Random Goodness

We all came back from Spring Break rejuvenated and ready to tackle our last 9 weeks together. *Tear*...I seriously love my class this year. I'll be so sad when this school year is over.

We've done a ton of amazing activities that I've found from various blogs this past week. Here are some of the highlights:

We're learning all about adjectives this week and Abby's Pop Rock writing unit has been a great way to add some excitement to it. Tomorrow we're going to put together the craft with this. I'm super excited to see how cute they turn out! In their final writing today one little girl added in her story how I couldn't eat any with them because it was all sugar. Ha, little ones can be so perceptive sometimes!

We started learning about the sun and the moon this week in Science. To help understand why the moon has so many craters we used flour and these bouncy balls to show how a meteor would impact the surface of the moon. We mostly just pressed them down...but a couple of times I let them fall from higher up. They loved it! I originally found this idea here.

When we first started talking about the moon I asked my kiddos what all they already knew about it. One of my sweet ones said, "I know that when the moon is full, the weirdos come out." And I was being observed at the same time. Ha...I laughed and she insisted that it was true. Tomorrow we'll be learning about the moon phases with some delicious cookies!

Near the back of my room we have a book wall where we can see the books we've read throughout the year (ahem...I did a much better job copying the covers last year. We have definitely read more than this throughout the year!) I got this from a friend who got the idea from Beth Newingham. I wanted to bring this up because I often have my students referring to it to make connections as we read. This week our main story in Treasures was Olivia. After reading that her brother was a copycat a student raised his hand and said he had a text-to-text connection and that it reminded him of Ruby the Copycat. I'm blown away by my students memory of the books we've read. Since it's near our carpet they're always looking up at it and it keeps everything fresh in their mind.

We also referred to it a lot when practicing summarizing. Students picked a previous read aloud and gave the summary while students scanned the wall to find the book they were summarizing. It was great practice and everyone was successful when using it!

I've shown this before, but every day I am just blown away by the number sentences that my students can create. Because my students are obsessed with it, I've taught them very informally how to multiply. I've only told them about the numbers that we regularly count by (1, 2, 5, & 10) so they can be more successful. Do you think that it's okay to teach them this even though it's not developmentally appropriate for some of them? I have mixed feelings about it but as you can see some of them can really do it! I welcome input! :)

One last thing I wanted to share was what kept me busy over the last couple of days of spring break. It was time to retire my Valentine's wreath and I made a cute new spring wreath. It turned out much better than I was expecting!

This weekend my goal is to create some new spring work stations. Hopefully they turn out well and I will have some to share. Have a great Friday!