Open House Time

The year has gone by in a flash and now I'm staring straight into the tunnel and I see the light of summer... Oh, boy! I can't wait! Do you feel me?!

We are getting close, just three weeks left here...but of course we had to have open house first!

One of the days I look forward to each year is open house. I love watching the kids share their work with their families. Their smiles say it all. And the big bonus? Unlike back to school night, I'm not on. The parents are not there to see me, so our conversation is short and sweet. The night is filled with hugs and fun. 

Our theme this year was weather. Take a peek!

Graphing the seasons:

Watercolor painting our favorite season-I took a profile pic of the kids and changed the exposure in Word to make it all black, then cut it out :)

Studying climates around the world (thanks to Reagan Tunstall)

Learning about meteorologists and their tools!

Our own mini meteorologists :)

Storms KWL ( we also wrote about storms!)

Clouds and cloud facts! (Thanks Cara Carroll)

Cloud Men with list poems

And adjective rainbows! Can you see them hanging from the lights?

Season tri-o-ramas with paper bag trees. This is a fall one!

Hope you enjoyed a peek at my open house room. I wish I had a wide shot of it all, but the night was so busy that I forgot to take one! I'm blaming it on open house brain! ;)

Here's to a few more weeks!

M

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!

Weather Tools, Clouds and Pilgrims!

Okay, here we go.

This week we have been doing district benchmarks so, keeping up with classroom goodies has been tough. So here is a recap of some highlights from our week!

We are closing in on the final stretch of our weather unit. We finished up talking about tools to measure weather and completed these pages in our science journals.

You can get the weather tool pages HERE!

We also began learning about clouds. I took some tips from Cara at The First Grade Parade and Abby at The Inspired Apple to get our cloud week in gear.

And using my limited tech skills I managed to connect my desktop to the document camera and projector to show a powerpoint presentation I made about clouds. I amazingly found one pic of clouds over the Golden Gate Bridge... the kids were in awe :) If you think it might be useful to you, click the clouds to download the presentation.

The font wouldn't transfer, so hopefully you can change it to something cute when you download!

Next week we will do our cloud accordion books and It Looked Like Spilt Milk writing and art. Stay tuned for pics.

Yesterday we did our first "November" art of the month. We cranked out our Pilgrim boys and girls for our literacy quilt and compared and contrasted Pilgrim kids to 2011 kids in response to our literature, Sarah Morton's Day.

And a random, because I love my kiddos work... We reviewed short I this week and we made these short I pigs. I gave a directed art lesson on how to make the pigs and they filled them with short I words...SO cute :)

lengthy right?... well I'm glad you stuck with me. Have a very happy weekend!

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!