Five For Friday - Easter and Earth Day

Hi All!

Happy Easter Weekend!

I'm happy to be joining Doodle Bugs Teaching for this week's Five For Friday.

I found some cute Easter decor this year, and will be sad to put it away come Monday.

 The lower right bunny is from Pier 1.

The lower left egg and candle is from Steins.

The upper pieces are from Gordmans.  Sadly our Gordmans is going out of business.

We've been working on synonyms, so I found an Easter egg template online that was a simple stripe pattern.

I put different words in the line under the name, and students chose which word they wanted.

We used the website www.thesaurus.com to find a variety of synonyms.

I have an online thesaurus investigation available in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

These made for a cute bulletin board display!

Have you ever received recipes in the mail and wondered what to do with them?

I used to receive lots, and decided to take them to school. I noticed on a standardized test once that students were required to read and analyze a recipe.

This station activity is always a BIG hit with my third graders.

 They are required to answer questions about the order of the directions, and I run a copy of recipes that students are really interested in.

My Spring Break was two weeks ago, and I went to Los Angeles to the NSTA conference.

I was lucky to meet two fantastic authors, and get their autographs on classroom books.

Ashley Spires was giving away her book!

Andrea Beaty's books were only $5.00!  Many of us teachers in line bonded over our love of these books!

I was also lucky to attend the premiere of this movie with a group of teacher friends while in LA.

 The producer of the movie spoke to us about the making of the movie.

The visuals in this film were beautiful, and it had a cute story, too!

I would highly recommend it.

If you are looking for a pack of fun and engaging activities for Earth Day, check out this pack, which is available in my TpT store!

 Hope you had a great week!

Happy Easter!

April Currently and Tried It Tuesday - Earth Day Activities

No foolin'!  It's April!

Time for Farley's Currently Link-Up!

I am on Spring Break this week, and love watching all 4 hours of the Today Show while I'm doing this and that.  Today I saw some funny photos about why kids cry, that have gone viral.

On that same note, I love having no time parameters this week.  I can stay up and read and not worry about being a zombie the next day.

It's another day of cold here in WI.  Usually I go away somewhere warm during Spring Break, but have a big move coming up next week so needed to spend the time (and money) on that.

Sure would be nice to have a warm, sunny day here, though.

I'm looking into washers and dryers - any suggestions???

Teachers in my district have what's called "Professional Hours".

This means we can arrive and leave around the student hours. 

So, I am not a morning person and arrive around 8:05, but don't leave each day until about 5:15.

They're called "Professional Hours" because our district assumes you'll be a professional - deciding which time frame works for you.  We do have to attend scheduled morning or after school meetings, though.

I'm also hooking up with Holly for her Tried It Tuesday linky.

I've been working on organizing my series books. In third grade we do a whole unit on series books, and I wanted them to stand out in my classroom library.

I got green boxes (which match my gray chevron/green/black color scheme) from Steps to Literacy.

The cute labels are from Creative Teaching Press!

I just ran the book series titles on sticky back paper, and attached them to the CTP stickers.

Are you looking for some fun standards-based Earth Day activities for your literacy groups?

I created this packet with skits, scrambled sentences, cause-effect sheets, and more!

My kids love acting and skits, so I knew I wanted to include a planning sheet for that.

The packet includes 24 Earth Day tips that students use as a theme for their skits.

The goal in the skit is to persuade others to observe that Earth Day tip.

Hope you'll check it out in my Teachers Pay Teachers store!

Happy April!

Five For Friday - Earth Day, Etc.

So glad it's Friday - it was one of those days.  We couldn't get in the computer lab because of testing, the weather is cold, blustery and snowy (!), and a student got sick in the midst of all the goings on in my classroom this afternoon.

I'm happy to once again join Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five For Friday.

 

1. My heart goes out to those in Boston who were affected by the tragic events on Monday.  It's been heartwarming to watch what has happened to lead to the capture today.  Boston - we all support you, and you make us proud to be Americans.

 

2. Last weekend I went to Madison to spend the weekend with two of my good friends.  We shopped, ate, drank, talked about school and life, and saw the movie "42" which was excellent. While shopping we stopped at a yummy cupcake shop.

 

3. All week my students read and discussed books about the Titanic since the 101st anniversary of it's sinking was a few days ago.  We watched this great video from history.com to whet our appetites about this historical event:

http://www.history.com/topics/titanic/videos#deconstructing-history-titanic

 

We also did activities from a great unit that I purchased on TPT from Joy in the Journey.  You can find this creative and engaging unit here.  Unfortunately I did not get any pictures.

 

4. We had our Spring concert on Thursday night.  It made for a long day but it was fun to see the students dressed up in their best duds.

 

5. Today we started our celebration of Earth Day by making Earth bracelets.  Each bead represents one aspect of our Earth.

Blue - water, clear - air, green - plants, brown - land, black - night, white - day, yellow - sun, blue string - Earth