It's Sparkling!

Two tidbits before we get to the teaching stuff...

So... today I am meeting my kiddos in line after lunch and one of my cuties comes running up to me and says, in the most excited voice ever..."Mrs. Hodson! It's SPARKLING!" Um... he meant sprinkling :) LOVE!

And...I spent all day thinking it was Tuesday (it's not, my kiddos informed me after we went to the computer lab and there was another class in there)... well at least I didn't spend the day thinking it was Thursday!

Yes, it was one of those days.

Alrighty, onto some teaching stuff...This week we started in on clocks.

I got these fun dry erase clocks from donors choose and the kids love them! We practiced setting the time to the hour and to the half.

And here's a game that we will be doing in math tubs next week. Just click the pic to download :)

 We also started our animal reports this week (a part of our zoo unit). The kids were allowed to choose any animal that could be found in a zoo, which opened up ALOT of options! My kiddos choose everything from elephants to the duck-billed platypus  (thanks phineas and ferb!). Since our school's library is tiny, I headed to the city library to pick up some extra books and it was SO worth it. Each kiddo was able to get their own book to do research out of! Today's assignment: find two facts about your animal!

And since it is BEYOND impossible to find animal books at a 1st/2nd grade for every animal, we headed to the computer lab (yep.. we had to come back later in the day since I slipped up earlier) to do some research on kids.nationalgeographic.com. OMG! A great site... complete with pics, info, videos and even sound clips of the animals.

They will start writing down their facts and organizing them tomorrow :) The class is buzzing about animals non-stop!

Oh! And I have been tagged :) I will get those questions answered soon!

Have a great rest of the week!

Clouds!

Hooray! We are so close to finishing our weather/seasons unit. Today was our last day of clouds and we push into the water cycle starting tomorrow.

The kids have done SUPER AWESOME with clouds, especially the pronunciation of the cloud names. They are so darling... every time there's a cloud in the sky they are staring up deciding which type it is, LOVE IT! To finish off clouds I had a tone of ideas, but a short week + a release day = less projects :(  So, we did a cloud accordion book with cotton ball clouds and a little black (which was to turn out gray, but you know those heavy handed first graders!) watercolor paint for that "stormy/fog" look.

Not super fancy but the kids adored it! After we finished the "art" aspect, we read they book to our buddies telling them all the facts we knew about each cloud. A fun way to end clouds!

Tomorrow is turkey day and I am excited! I made a new turkey pattern and I think it will be super cute, plus we have been talkin' turkeys all week, so their stories should be good, fingers crossed!

What's the Weather?

Let me start by saying science has been seriously suffering this year :( With my crazy schedule, we literally have only 75 min a week to squeeze in science (or social studies, depending) and it is driving me bonkers. So we have been sluggishly moving through our weather/seasons unit, but we have had some fun doing it that's for sure.

We made two season trees, fall and winter...spring and summer will be coming sometime soon.

We tore the paper for the tree and used the end of a paintbrush for our falling leaves.

shaving cream and glue combo to make puffy snow. This was awesome and the kids loved it! A wonderful pinterest find.

We talked about the types of weather we can have and completed this in our science journals.

doesn't that storm cloud look dangerous!

Then we got to meet Miss Meteorologist! We learned what she does and how she does it! We watched a clip of a weather anchor on the news. Then we put together this chart to show what we had learned.

And of course, this led us right into talking about the tools to measure weather. I got out the GIANT thermometer (I wish I had a pic, it really is big), our rain gauge, and some pictures of a wind vane (because I don't have a real one; it's on the "to get" list). It wasn't rainy so the rain gauge didn't go over as well as the thermometer... but it will rain soon enough.

 I cant wait till we get to the water cycle in a couple of weeks! FUN WILL BE HAD!

Learning About the Seasons

I love the seasons and weather. It is by far one of my favorite science units. Now... that being said, can I just say it is hard to talk about the seasons where I teach. I mean really... it pretty much looks the same here year around. Sure we have a few leaves change, but nothing like the pictures and books describe, so the seasons are actually difficult for my kids to really grasp. But we push on anyway with pictures and descriptions of the way places look in the various seasons.

So...to start off this unit we read two books: A Tree For All Seasons and Watching the Seasons and created an anchor chart to show what we know so far about the seasons.

Throughout the rest of the week we will be working in our seasons and weather science journal and creating our own trees for every season.

If you do the seasons also, have a look at our journal... it's a freebie!Click the pic below!

Clip art and fonts by DJ Inkers and Miss Tiina