Tis' the Season to be JOLLY!

Man has it been a CRAZY few weeks! Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending a mixer with members from my sorority, Alpha Phi! I attended college at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany and graduated in 2012. When I was there I decided to join a sorority! Definitely one of the best decisions of my life! Here is a look at our little get together!  

We’ve Gone BuGGy!

For two weeks we have been learning all about insects! I always start by telling the kids that they are going to be scientists! This always gets them excited for our next adventure. For this unit we are entomologists (scientists who study insects). As I’m sure you do, I ALWAYS play it up when we are introducing a new topic. Have you ever talked at home like you do to your students? HA! My boyfriend thinks I’m crazy when I do this…LOL. Anyway we read a few books about insects and we filled in a can have are chart. I LOVE using the can have are chart because it is easy for the kids to follow along and to sort our ideas. Since our insect unit is two weeks long we focus on two insects each week. The first week we learn all about bees and ants, and the following week we focus on butterflies and fireflies. We also practice comparing and contrasting with each of the insects on a Venn diagram. We finish out our unit by making our own insect with marshmallows, chocolate chips, twizzlers and pretzels! The kids can choose what they want but their insect must have a head, thorax, an abdomen, antennae and six legs. Send them home in a Ziploc for a fun treat to share with parents! 

    

                                     

APPLES!

HAPPY APPLE WEEK!

If you're like me then you love to eat! I like teaching about food because well…it’s something I think about ALL the time! One of my favorite things to teach about is apples! The week before our apple unit I send home a sheet explaining the apple activities we will be completing and I ask for each child to bring in two apples of any kind. This year I only have 14 kids so that gave us 28 apples to work with. The apples will be used to do several different activities throughout the week (it also keeps me from spending more of my own money). We started by using our schema to discuss what we know about apples! We read a book about apples of course, and we taste tested a red, a yellow and a green apple. This can be easily used to graph on chart paper. I also introduced Johnny Appleseed and we charted the facts we learned about him. I like to incorporate researching on the computer as another way to learn information. You will want to do this BEFORE you do it with the class. That way you can preview the sites that you want to use with your class. This way they understand that there is many different ways to learn about something. Our apple week also consists of making applesauce and dipping our own caramel apples. It is a busy and hectic week but the kids love it—and that’s all that matters! J

Down on the Farm!

HOWDY YA'LL! My favorite unit so far this year was our farm unit! The kids absolutely LOVED learning about all of the animals and about what farmers do. Our school is located in Floyds Knobs, Indiana and it is surrounded by a lot of land and some farms. I really think it would be neat to go to a dairy farm and let the kids see all of the hard work that farmers put in (maybe next year!). I used Deanna Jump's Farm Fun Mega Unit and lots of ideas from Pinterest. You can check out my farm unit board HERE. Both are the perfect resources to add to the activities that we did in class. Deanna's provides nonfiction books to use for various farm animals. We learned about pigs, cows, chickens, and sheep. I definitely recommend using her unit! You can purchase it HERE! I will warn you that teaching about cows, chicken, and pigs may rock some of your kids worlds! Ha! I had a few that didn't know we eat these animals! Uh oh! That made for some interesting conversations! :)

Nonfiction and Fiction Frog Unit!

Just now getting around to posting all of our hard work on our Frog Unit! We worked on frogs for two weeks! We started with learning all about real frogs. We learned what nonfiction means and we researched information about real frogs. We also learned about the life cycle of frogs and we compared them with toads. We made the life cycle seen below modeled after Kim Adsit's in her Frogs and Butterflies Unit on TPT. I also used some of the graphic organizers from Deanna Jump's Frog Frenzy Unit on TPT. The kids LOVED learning all sorts of information about frogs and Herpetologists!

     The next week we focused on a fiction week of frogs. We read several of the Froggy books and did a character analysis on Froggy. We have been working on the parts of a story and this really helped us focus on the what a character is. We used Deanna Jump's Froggy Math and Literacy Fun Unit! It includes a lot of fun little comprehension and math activities. Deanna makes my life so much easier! :-) We read "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Frog" and making the cute little old lady craft. I found the idea on Pinterest and made a little sketch on paper. It was super easy and turned out really cute! The kids thought the book and craft was hilarious! I would definitely have swallowed a doughnut also! Hehe! We ended our fiction frog unit by reading "Prince of a Frog". It is a cute little story about a Frog wanting to be a Prince and in the end his friends show him they love him for who he is! We painted a frog and then--the BEST part--bedazzled a crown for him. I thought they turned out so cute! So much fun!