Five for Friday {Saturday Edition}

I had every intentions of posting my Five for Friday last night, but I didn't so here we are.  :)

I am linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching again.

1.  My hubby built me this planter for the veggies I want to grow this summer.  I was finally able to plant some of them the other day.

2.  This week my students learned how to measure using rulers.  Once they understood how to do this, we used a Kagan Cooperative Learning Structure called Rally Coach to practice measuring items around the room.  It was great practice and it got them up and moving around which always helps too!

3.  As part of our ABC Countdown we had "S" day which for my classroom was sunglasses and shaving cream day.  The kiddos wore their sunglasses all day and we used shaving cream at the end of the day to write sight words.  {They were having so much fun that they didn't realize they were learning.  Shhhh........please don't tell them!}

4.  As part of our ocean animal unit, we created these jellyfish.  I was going to hang them from my ceiling clips, but the kiddos really wanted to take them home so I let them.  They were having so much fun playing with their jellyfish that I just couldn't say no.

5.  One of the teachers at our school is a certified scuba diver and her father actually teaches the certification classes for scuba diving.  When I was telling her about our ocean unit, she told me how her father used to come in and give presentations to her class when she was in school.  She asked him if he would interested in coming to present to the littles at our school and he said YES!  I have to tell you.  This was amazing!  The students were just so engaged and interested in everything he had to say.  {Warning....lots of pictures, but it so was COOL!}

 Trying on the googles.

 Three-horned trunk fish

 Trying on the flippers.

 Sea Urchins

Coral

A puffer fish

He made sure to tell the students that all the animals were already dead when they found them in the ocean.  They never take any live animals out of the ocean.  I truly hope they will come back next year.  :)

My friend Becky from The Compassionate Teacher is having her 100 follower giveaway.  She is one of the sweetest people.  Click on the image to go enter her giveaway.  She has 3 separate giveaways.....amazing!!

I hope you had a great week too.  Link up with Doodle Bugs and tell everyone what your Five for Friday was!

Find me at.....

I am blogging over at Mrs. Thigpen's Kindergarten today. You can find me there today. I am posting about tracking student behavior data and what to do with it. Click {here} to head to her blog.  While you are there, you should follow Nicki's blog.  She is fabulous and we have become friends through our blogging world.

Oceans of Fun!

Before I start my post, I want to say that I hope all the mothers out there had a wonderful Mother's Day.  I stayed off the computer all day and just enjoyed time with my family.  We planted some flowers, fruit, and veggies plants, and I was able to even sneak in a nap.  It was wonderful!!

We are finishing up our two week Ocean Animal Unit this week.  Boy have we learned a lot about different ocean animals.

We start every day with a chit-chat message.  Here is an example:

 My students have become fantastic authors and illustrators.  Just check out some of their writing and a few directed drawings we completed.

We have been using the math centers from my Ocean Math Centers.  You can grab those {here}.

One of my favorite activities we did last week was a reading response activity with the story "The Pout-Pout Fish" by Deborah Diesen.

I asked my students to complete the sentence, "To make the pout pout fish smile, I would...."  They had to also illustrate their idea.  I LOVED what they came up with.

 "give candy"                                                       "do a joke"

"make silly faces"                                         "give him a hug"

What did I tell you adorable or what??  Now I have a quick funny story to share with you.  A couple of weeks ago my class was working on persuasive writing.  I wanted to model this to my class so I chose something I was going to have to talk the hubby into letting me get or do.  I chose a pedicure.  Here is my example:

I told my class how my hubby teases me about my toes.  I also told them that it was o.k. because I tease my hubby about his toes as well.  Anyways, it must have really stuck with one particular student because look what I got as a teacher appreciation gift.

This same student also brought me these beautiful daisies.  :)

I showed him the picture of the daisies so he could see where I put them in my house.  {The water immediately turned that weird color......I think it is from the dye they use for the flowers or something.}  We decided we needed a picture together.  :)

Hope you had a fantastic teacher appreciation week and Mother's Day weekend.  

Mother's Day Gifts...yeah or nay?

Let me start this post with the fact that I am a mom.  I know Mother's Day is in May, but I kind of forgot about it this year.  I already a gift ready to go for my own mother, but things at work have been a little crazy so I forgot.

So, tomorrow would be the day to do something for the kids to take home to mom.  Here is my dilemma....I have two students in my class whom have no mother.  Do I still make some sort of Mother's Day gift with the class?  One of those two has an older sister who helps take care of him, but the other little one doesn't have a female figure in his life.

What would you do?  I would love to hear your thoughts on this.  I am torn because I don't want to make things any harder for these two little ones, but I don't want to leave the others out.

Leave me a comment and tell me what you think.  I am anxious to hear!

Teacher Appreciation Sale

Hi friends!  I have had a very busy Monday so this is going to be short and sweet.  I'm sure you have already heard about the fabulous sale that starts tomorrow on Teachers Pay Teachers.

My store will be on sale for 20% off and then you can receive an additional 10% off by entering the code TAD13 at check-out.

I like to go in and buy items that have been on my wishlist on the first day.  I leave feedback to collect my credits.  Then I go back the second day for round 2 and use all my TpT credits.  :)

Click {here} to check out the products in my store.  Here are some of my favorite items in my store.  Click on the images to head straight to those products.  Since I am so thankful for all my followers, I am starting my sale today and ending it on Thursday.  That's TWO extra days of sale prices!!

 
 

          

And my newest creation:

Happy Shopping!!  Keep calm & Shop on!

Going to the Zoo

My little kinder babies have been studying about zoo animals for two weeks now.  I think they are now ready for our zoo field trip at the end of the month.  My zoo unit is one of my favorites to teach because the students are so interested in all the animals.  :)

When I introduced the unit, we did a cooperative learning structure called "Rally Robin".  The students are paired and then one person shares 1 idea, then the next person shares 1 idea.  This is a great structure when you are trying to generate a list.  I had the students use "Rally Robin" to generate a list of animals we would see at a zoo.  Here is what we came up with:

We focused on an animal a day for 9 days.  The 9 zoo animals we learned about were hippos, rhinos, monkeys, tigers, lions, alligators, zebras, giraffes, and elephants.

I start every morning with some sort of recap of the learning we did yesterday as well as a preview about what we learn today.  I like to do this with chit-chat messages.  Here are a couple of the chit-chat messages we did during our zoo unit.

The first couple of days during our unit I taught the students how to play a new sight word game during reading groups.  It is called ROAR!  It is like many other sight word games where the students pick a card, read the word, and keep the card.  If they pull a ROAR card, they have to put all the cards back in the pile.  They LOVED this game!!!  

We also used the centers in my Going to the Zoo unit.  Here they are in action:

I love to have the students do non-fiction writing when we are doing our themed units.  We made the "All About Zoo Animals" book from my unit.  Here are so samples of my students writing.  I am so proud of how far they have come this year.

Look at those illustrations.  Aren't they fabulous?

We love to make crafts in my room.  :)  What kid doesn't like to get out the scissors and glue every once in awhile?  As we make our crafts, we talk about the importance of each body part or what it is used for.  This way we are also making connections to science while we are creating our masterpieces.  Both of these crafts are from Deanna Jump's zoo unit which you can find {here}.

We also used the math centers from my unit, but somehow I never ended up getting any pictures of them in action.  Probably because I was using my math center time to assess my little kinders.  If you are interested in any of these centers or ideas, you can check out my "Going to the Zoo" unit by clicking on the image below.

Next week we will start a two week unit on ocean animals.  I plan on using Deanna Jump's Ocean unit and then my sweet friend Khrys' Ocean Animals unit.  Click on the images to check them out:

I am working on some Ocean themed math centers that I hope to finish tonight or tomorrow as well as an ocean emergent reader.  My students love them and look forward to adding these books to their "bag of books."

Since my students loved the ROAR game so much, I decided to make a SHARK game.  It is played the same way as I described above.  This is a freebie in my TpT store.  Click on the image to grab it for your classroom.  :)

Enjoy the rest of your weekend friends!  It is finally supposed to stop raining tomorrow and I am taking my niece to get pedicures.....can't wait!!  :)