The Butterfly Life Cycle and March Quilt

Alrighty... I am just home form an EDI training and soon to be off to a showing of Beauty and the Beast the musical... so this is a quick update on some the fun things we did this week...(p.s. sorry for the yucky pics forgot to charge the camera battery and had to use my phone)...

We read about the butterfly life cycle in our anthologies this week so we spent a lot of time sequencing the cycle. We put together this project with a writing to match. You can get the writing page HERE (thank you KPM Digital and DJ inkers!).

a corn kernel for the egg, a dyed noodle for the caterpillar, a cotton ball for the chrysalis and a colored coffee filter wrapped with a pipe cleaner as the butterfly.

We are going to keep rolling with the butterfly theme a bit next week too, so stay tuned for those activities.

We also got to complete our March quilt this week! I love this quilt... seriously too cute! We read the story The Luckiest St. Patrick's Day, talked about the "luck of the Irish" and then came up with ideas of how we are lucky. It took a little prodding and leading but I was finally able to get them to think about the non-material items we are lucky to have...

ok.. so if you have seen my other quilts, you will notice that this is on a different board... yep, redoing the writing wall.. a post to come on that later

They made the leprechaun kid with pattern pieces and strips of orange construction paper that they rolled with their pencils. Their writing is under the shamrock as a lift-and-read and we added some green glitter to the shamrocks to spice them up a bit.

"I am lucky because my grandma makes me my favorite noodles."

Okay.. that's all for now have a great Saturday night and don't forget to fix your clocks!

If you give a pig a pancake... pattern freebie!

This week we did one of Laura Numeroff's fabulous books, If You Give a Pig a Pancake! My students just adore her books so the fact that HM tucked this one into the anthology made my kiddos' week.

We spent most of the week talking about cause and effect, pick up our worksheet HERE, and what is real vs. fantasy. This kids got to make up fantasy statements about pigs. Some of my faves that they came up with were ... "Pigs can go shopping with Mrs. Hodson" and "Pigs can be spaceship commanders" (we also learnerd about Neil Armstrong this week). Then we disproved each students' wacky claim. The kids really liked doing that part!

We also threw in a little compound word study, we did the bulk of it last week but they are still so excited when they spot one :) So, we made this cute pig to go along with our story which is holding writing about what each child would give their pig (but they could only choose things that were compound words). I think they look too funny! Here are a couple of my kiddos pigs...

And here is our whole class pig board...

You can get the pig pattern and writing page by clicking on the pic below!

Have a great weekend!

Let's Catch Up!

So it's been super crazy around here lately.... way too much going on. But here is what we have been up to :)

We completed our January quilt. I think this one turns out the funniest because they have to free cut all of the shapes. I mean... look at the boots!!!

We started our I Love America unit and kicked it off with talking about how we honor America. We do the pledge and sing flag songs every morning (their favorite if Yankee Doodle, mine is You're A Grand Old Flag) so the concept of honoring America is totally relatable. We made our American flags and completed a pledge cloze worksheet.

And this weeks HM story was The Sleeping Pig. It's about a pig that falls asleep in a watermelon patch and the child in the story calls on her animal friends to help get the pig out of the patch. So, to go along with the story we made ourselves enjoying watermelon (just like the girl does at the end of the story) and wrote how we would get a pig out of our patch. I think they came out darling!

(on left: I would get Mrs. Pig out by rolling her with my skateboard on right: I would get Mrs. Pig out by playing the gong)

See busy... Ill be back soon with some freebies, plus I have to tell you all about my new workshop (I'm in LOVE with it)! See you then!

The Winner and Freebies!

And the winner is....

 

but, because I want everyone to have something... here are a couple of freebies for you! But first some back story (remember good things come to those who read on! ha ha) 

So, we are working on contractions this week in HM, and this is always such a tough one for the kiddos... so we started with this chart and my "rules for contractions"

we do this great finger play to go along with the rules that the kids LOVE! 

 Then we did this interactive poster (courtesy of Abby at The Inspired Apple - love her!). Way easy to understand and the kids jumped right on!

I choose the contraction ahead of time, the kids highlighted the letters to leave out, helped me write the remaining letters and added the apostrophe!

And... tomorrow we will be doing this sort in small groups and the worksheet during workshop! So, you should have them too! Click the pics to download and I hope you enjoy them :)

Have a wonderful Monday! See you soon :)