More Word Art and Camouflage Chameleons

Today I will catch on some science and BAV activities.

In science we talked about camouflage so I pulled out my favorite activity the camouflage chameleon. If you are interested in the chameleon, you can find the free copy here. The kids did a great job!

I have shown some word art on here before, but I wanted to show a few more that I thought were just terrific!

I loved this one because the little boy remembered we had learned that the Plains Indians would cause the buffalo to stampede off the side of a cliff to kill them before they had horses.

These two girls were doing the word extinct and they made the T look "ghostly" to make it look like it no longer existed.

I thought boy did a terrific job with the word reptile.

I showed it to Taleah, here is what she came up with...all I can say is WOW!

Five for Friday

I'm joining with Doodle Bugs Teaching for her weekly linky party Five for Friday.

1. I want to tell you about one of my little friends in my class. She can be just an absolute treasure and then completely, for no reason do a 180. She is one of my older students, but you wouldn't guess if from the way she acts. She is always blurting out and if I give someone a compliment, she always pipes up, "What about me?" When she gets mad, she says, " I thought you were a nice teacher, I wanted to be in your class. I didn't know you were a mean teacher. I want to go to the other class!" She gets upset with other kids easily also. The other day she came to me and said another girl was staring at her. I said, It's probably because you are so pretty." You should have seen the look on her face when I told her that. I told her the next time someone is staring at you, just remind yourself, "Oh yeah, I'm beautiful!" She walked away with out another word and a very happy look on her face. I wish she were always that easy.

2. We have been studying the body systems in core Knowledge So as I said in my last post, I pulled out this song from Scholastics "101 Science Song and Poems for young Learners" to go along with what we have been learning. I must say the kids learned the whole song very quickly. We only worked on it 3 days and most of them had the words and tune.

3. You know how all kids seem to just love puppets, when I found this puppet awhile back in an alphabet puppet book that I pulled out and put with my Human Body unit. It was all I could do to keep the kids from coloring blood dripping off of the skull! lol

 To add a little learning to it, we glued this little information page that I made on the back of the puppet. Now we are ready for to sing the song with the puppets to another class. : )

4. When I first got on Pinterest, one of my first pins was this

from The Techy Teacher. I have wanted to try it out ever since I first saw it. every year, I would forget about it until it was too late. So finally last week I remembered to buy a pumpkin so I could give it a try with my class. I just bought a small pumpkin (not a mini) so it would sit in the window sill. I'll let you know how it goes. I am a little concerned that the flies will be swarming all around it, but we'll see.

5. Before I cut the pumpkin open, we of course had to do a little pumpkin exploration. I have already ran out of my allotted copies for the month so instead of using the really cute pumpkin page I found, the kid wrote in their journal instead. We estimated the weight, measured it with Unifix Cubes, measured how big around it was, how many lines were on it, etc... After I cut the top off, I passed it around for the kids to smell and touch. all of the kids got to take home a their own pumpkin seed planted in a cup.

Enjoy your weekend!

Week in Review

I posted my Testing Song in the last post. Several classes are going to sing it Monday morning to kick-off our testing week. My kids worked on it Monday and Tuesday. They had it down and were singing it during centers. Then at staff meeting Tuesday afternoon, one of the kdg teachers brings up that she didn't think it should say "Don't you guess.". She said they are supposed to guess as opposed to leaving the answer blank. We have sang this song the past 3 years and no one has ever said a word about this, but I do want to be a team player, so I sat with the said teacher's sister(who teaches 5th) and made the adjustment. So here is the revised version:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4viYvUGzTgqMUlQUmQzU3g1cEk/view?usp=sharing

We always make bags of brain friendly treats for the test takers. I teach at a very small school (2 teachers per grade level). So I usually sign up for to help out with the testing incentives. I want my former students to know that I am pulling for them. ; ) Anyway, I made a little poster for each testing classroom. I printed it on 4 sheets of paper to make it bigger. Since there are a bunch of Googled pics, I can't share it.

Each of the treats on the poster are in the bags for the testers. Then the first graders made drew pictures of the testers and I put them together by class to make a little quilt. Here is an example of the one for my daughter's class.

As you can see some of my students are in serious need of some art lessons. haha

When I used to teach kindergarten, one of my favorite websites was www.makinglearningfun.com
Now that I teach first I can still use some of their things. We have been studying plants, so this week we made the lifecycle of a sunflower from www.makinglearningfun.com. I added the words to each picture. I talk about my old teaching buddy a lot, she moved away and I miss her dearly. I don't have anyone at the moment that I create with. Anyway she was very sciencey (is that a word?), she wanted the lifecycle to go in a circle, so we would always trace pictures 3 and 4 from the back so the life cycle would be in a circle. They turned out great! Ignore my scratched up chalkboard, I just hung these for the picture.

Here is one upclose.

Here is another great one from www.makinglearningfun.com It is the seasons of an apple tree.

And here it is upclose.

Those 2 projects inspired me to make this frog life cycle. I already had the copy of the life cycle so I made up this frog to put it on. Here is the link from Scholastic. Thanks Michelle Blackburn!

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