Five for Friday! First One!

Five for Friday!

This is my first one!  So here goes!

1.  These are the Boo-Boo Bunnies we made to go with our story map about Home for a Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown.

The children loved them and carried their bunnies with them everywhere they went!

2. We made Rabbit research reports.  The children sorted and categorized rabbit facts into four different categories.  Then we turned it into a rabbit shape report!

I created and posted this project in my new package All about Rabbits on Teachers Pay Teachers this week.

3.  This is the Easter bonnet I wore for our Easter Bonnet Day yesterday.  Everyone tried to wear a hat to show their school spirit and raise money to buy roosters and chickens for World Vision.  For a $1.00 minimum donation everyone could wear an Easter bonnet, bunny hears, or favourite hat all day in school!  Lots of fun!

4. We made Easter baskets.  They made great homes for the Boo-Boo bunnies too!

5. We made a bunny cloze about what real bunnies can do and what the Easter Bunny can do!

Thanks to Doodle Bugs for hosting this linky party! This is my first one.  Hope I did it right!

Winter Fun

Have a look at the snowmen our class made!  Each year I read the story Snowballs by Lois Elhert and then I send home a snowman template with instructions to the families to make a snowman using their imaginations and "stuff"!

 I am always so impressed by the wonderful snowmen they create!  Aren't they amazing?!  

We are currently working on a project using the ipads to create a book using the app My Story about these amazing snowmen!  I love this app!  

We have been using the app Doodle Buddy to create Snowmen Diagrams.  Love, love, love them! 

The children will also be writing stories about their snowmen in the coming days and compiling all the pages we create into a digital book!  

We have also been working on our mini-unit about penguins!  I like to do mini research projects and then turn them into little booklets!  I have created a list of penguin facts that we sort and categorize into four groups together.  

We read the facts together on the overhead and decide on the code that we will use.  I created four categories for the facts.  They were:  What they Look Like, What they Eat, About the Babies, and Cool Facts.  I put the facts on the overhead and give each child their copy of the facts.  We read them together and decide on the code for each one.  Cool Facts gets a C, About the Babies is an B, What They Look Like is an L, and What they Eat gets an E.  

Then I pass out the four category pages and the children cut out the facts and paste them to the correct category based on the codes we have decided on.  The category pages are in the shape of the penguin's tummy.  I precut the penguin's body out of black paper.  An orange beak, two orange triangles for feet, and two stickers for the eyes complete the project!  We staple the completed category pages on the black penguin body and we have a funky penguin report! I love this project because it allows everyone to plug in at their level of readiness.  

We have been practising our addition skills using the winter workspaces from my Winter Fun package over the last few weeks.  P. S.  It's on sale at TPT on Super Sunday!  

I had a lot of fun finding new things for them to count with.  I found some cool foam snowflakes that are a bit hit, some snowflake buttons, and some cool little mitten and snowmen erasers at the  dollar store.  They don't seem to mind doing addition facts when they get to use these counters!  

They seem to enjoy the counting activity using these materials at centre time too!

This is part of the Winter Fun package, too!

We have been having a lot of fun with mittens!  We created this quilt working with pattern!  Lots of fun! 

More mitten stuff on the way!  

Dinosaur Days!

We have started working on a mini unit about dinosaurs in my classroom.  We did our first mini research report about Apatosaurus.  I managed to find a variety of interesting facts about apatosaurus from a variety of sources and made a fact list.  The children and I then categorized the facts into four groups.  They were: what they look like, what they eat, about the babies, and cool facts.  The children liked the cool facts category the best and I think they wanted to put everything in that category.  I guess they think that everything about dinosaurs is cool.

To add a "super funky" element to the project I prepared some covers for the booklets that could be made into dinosaurs.  I find that if I go the extra mile and create a "super funky" product to strive for, the children will go the extra mile and give me an excellent effort in their work.

I had fun creating a backdrop for their booklets.  I think we both had fun!

Batty about Bats!

Bats

We are currently working on a mini-theme about bats.  These bats are the final product!  The children loved making them and they are relatively easy to do!  

After reading a variety of non-fiction books about bats we compiled a list of our favourite types of bats and completed a frame containing their favourite picks!

The sheet is fine but we always like to make our final product look super funky so we added the fun cover!  

I pre-made the covers for the children using a 11 X 17 piece of black construction paper folded in half. Then I folded both ends of the paper toward the middle.  By rounding off the corners and cutting the bottom of the paper into a upside-down wave I had the body part.  I cut out a simple head shape and provided a single round sticker for eyes.  

The children completed the cloze sheet, put their poem in the middle of the book cover.  We made sure that the scooped part of the paper was at the top so that our bats could hang on the tree upside-down.  They glued the head on and then added the eyes.  The eyes are made with a single sticker cut in half and placed on the face.  

A copy of the cloze sheet I created is shown below.  If you would like a copy please click on the link.  

The bulletin board tree is twisted up brown paper.  I attached leaf garlands along the branches to get a fall tree look!  

The children are really proud of their projects!  

I am very lucky to have a laptop computer with WIFI and a projector in my class!  This allows me to show videos that correspond to the subject we are studying.  

The Primary Games website has an excellent video about the flying fox bat.  It is called Nigel's Bat Adventure.  Check it out!