Five for Friday- Froggy Edition

 I'm linking up with Doodle Bug's Five for Friday linky party to show you five things about my week. This week has been all about frogs! We started our frog unit and the kids are really having a lot of fun learning and creating. We had minimum days Wednesday through Friday. Since the schedule was different, we were able to get quite a bit done with our frog unit.

Our live tadpoles finally arrived! These guys are big, but not ginormous like the first ones that arrived DOA. The students are really enjoying watching them during their free time. We started our frog observation journals this week.

We started reading Frog and Toad are Friends. It's the perfect little chapter book for my kiddos. I'm using this little Frog and Toad are Friends Integrated Unit for many of our follow up activities.

Making friends and keeping friends is an on-going theme in my room with my students. So this book is helpful in reminding the students what makes a good friend and what that looks like. This cute craftivity literary response worked well after reading "The Story" chapter.

We also did a food chain activity this week. We talked about who eats what and how a food chain works. This little writing activity was the perfect repetition my students needed. This activity came from this curriculum book.

In math, we worked on some froggy word problems.  I love how their water color paintings turned out. The activity included frogs to color, but we had enough time to squeeze in a frog directed draw. Now they are perfect! I love the character in each of their frogs!

Now it's time to enjoy the weekend! It's supposed to be in the upper 80's this weekend. That is just going to make me ache for Spring Break! It's about a month away. Sigh.

Lace-a-Word

Today's featured center is Lace-a-Word. I love these little lacing letter beads from Lakeshore Learning. They are perfect for activities like this and combine fine motor skills all in one. Using any word list, the students locate the letters in their word. Lace the beads to spell the word, then write their word. Simple and no prep.

I finally put together some of the centers activities I use in my classroom and created Word Work Centers for Any Word List. 

Five for Friday- Really late

 I'm linking up with Doodle Bug's Five for Friday linky party to show you five things about my week.  Hey, it's Sunday night... but it's the first time I've sat down at my home computer in days! It's been a busy, but good week. Here's what we've been up to.

Last week we finished up our quick Jan Brett author study. I really enjoy her illustrations. The kids modeled their drawings after her illustrations.

It was way over due.  I finally updated my sub binder. I always leave detailed plans when I'm out, but the binder was really out of date. It was like a Throw Back Thursday opening up that sucker. Now I'm ready for my "site evaluation" at some point when my coordinator walks through my room and goes down her little check list.

I ordered some tadpoles this week for our life cycles unit. They arrived on Friday and are ginormous! I was not expecting such giant tadpoles. Nor that they would arrive dead.  I contacted the company and they are sending more tadpoles. Let's hope they make it this time.

Friday we had a site validation team tour our campus. Our school has been nominated for a California Distinguished School.  The team stopped by our room during our Friday afternoon tech time. They were impressed with our use of technology in my classroom and with our Computer Lapbooks we've been working on. We had a staff meeting after school and the team shared their thoughts about our school. It was nice to hear such positive things on a Friday afternoon!

Saturday our Deaf/hard of Hearing program hosted a fundraiser breakfast at Applebee's in order to raise money for our overnight field trip.  Every year we take our students (K-6) on a two night, three day adventure. My co-worker and I have planned and carried out 10 years of field trips and we are ready for our 11th. We actually haven't made a decision where we are going this year. But I do know it will be fun!

And here goes another week! We have three days of minimum days due to parent/teacher conferences. It will be a fast week!