Finally got a Working Camera

My camera went on the blitz a 3 or 4 months ago. I tried buying a really cheap one...bad idea, it was a piece of junk!!! I finally have a camera that I can take decent pictures with.

Last week in our Treasures book, we were reading Dot and Jabber and the Big Bug Mystery. The story is about 2 mice that keep thinking they are seeing and hearing things, but whenever they try to take a second look, it's gone. The bugs, toad, etc... are camouflaged into the background. We did a little art activity to understand camouflage, I gave each student a picture of a chameleon and a piece of wallpaper. They had to cut out the chameleon and glue to the wallpaper. They then colored it to blend in with the wallpaper. This idea came from one of my old teaching buddies. I think the kids did a great job!

Here's some close up, sorry they are a little blurry.

This is a picture of the chameleon I used. I shrank him down to fit 4 on a page.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4viYvUGzTgqbEczVVdGMVlSRXV0RVhsMjJORm9jdw/edit

After seeing all of the cute pictures on Pinterest of "Synonym Rolls" I really wanted to do it with my class. I was a little worried that some of them wouldn't have the language needed to come up with enough synonyms of one word to complete the roll. So I thought we could make synonym toast instead. I was going to write one very common word like big and a synonym that I thought they might not be familiar with like enormous on the "synonym toast". Then I was going to have them write 2 more synonyms on the toast and I thought I would follow up by having them write an antonym for the words on the back. That's what I was going to do, then I was looking through my synonym/antonym file and I found an antonym page from Carson-Dellosa that had little pieces of bread (toast) with pairs of words on them when I looked at it I realized if they weren't antonyms, the pair of words were synonyms. I made a tracer of a piece of bread for the kids to trace and then we turned the color worksheet into a cut and paste. They aren't as cute as the "synonyms rolls" but I thought they turned out cute and the kids liked doing it. What do you think?

The last thing I wanted to share was a flower puppet we made while studying plants. My old kdg. teaching buddy and I loved how a lot of the art on the www.makinglearningfun.com website would be more than just art, they add science, math, reading, etc... concepts to the project. So after that we always tried to do the same. I had a flower puppet, not sure where I got it from, that I had the kids make. Oops! I forgot to take a picture of a nicely colored one before the kids took them home, but here is what they look like.

On the back they made another flower. I had some large foam flowers from Dollar Tree, we used and then some little flower foamys in the middle to make it look a little better. We added an insect foamy to each flower for fun. After we finished the rest of the flower, we labeled the parts and discussed what their jobs were

For the finishing touch, the grass is only taped at the top so we could raise it to look at the roots.

OK, I guess that is enough for one post.

Kelly