It’s been an interesting ride, for sure!

Why not celebrate the last day with a 5 for Friday linky party?!  Today I’m linking up with [DoodleBugs] to share five random things from the past week.

 We’ve been having a blast popping the balloons to reveal a surprise for each day.  Today is bubble day – shhhh, don’t tell!

You can read more about this end of year countdown [here].

We wrapped up our unit on Eric Carle this week.

After reading A House for Hermit Crab, we had to make our own hermit crabs!

This craft is super simple and requires NO printing!

The kiddos traced their hands on red construction paper (this is the hermit crabs’ head/body).

Then we glued a small paper plate on (this is the hermit crabs’ shell).

We used a black crayon to add eyes, antennae, and a swirl on the shell.

Then the kiddos got to go to town with the watercolors to add details!

BTW say a little prayer that our butterflies come out of their cocoons today!!!  We reviewed butterfly life cycles with The Very Hungry Caterpillar, then got a chance to watch our own caterpillars grow – but these little ones need to hurry up so my kiddos can see them before summer break!

First off, today through Wednesday is STAAR testing (our state accountability exam).  During this lovely period of time K-2 gets to pretend that we don’t exist – I kid, I kid.  Well, sort of.  We really do have to nix the outdoor recess, stay super quiet in the halls, have grouped specials… the list goes on.  Needless to say the kiddos start to get a bit antsy after being cooped up so long.  (Hence the zoo reference part 1)

Luckily we will be visiting the Dallas Zoo for our Spring field trip next week so we are learning all things zoo animals leading up to it!  This is helping to keep us a little more motivated to learn.  (Hence the zoo reference part 2 – see, I kept my word!)

For today’s Monday Motivation post I want to share a new resource that I created to accompany our zoo unit.  I love this pack for the ease of bridging literacy, science, and social studies!

The plan is to focus on one animal per day during the literacy block and then again during the science block (double whammy!).  As we complete each page of our journal I am collecting them so that we can compile them later on.  I chose to print the writing page and labeling (science) page for each animal front and back to keep it simple.

Today we started off learning about elephants with a fantastic story called “Elephant’s Story” by Harriet Blackford.  Can I just say that the kiddos were enthralled listening as the elephant grew up.  This is such a great book for introducing just enough factual information, while following an engaging story line.

After we finished “Elephant’s Story” we created a class Can/Have/Are chart.  I love how much the kiddos had already picked up on from just our first exposure to elephants.

I think Can/Have/Are charts are so awesome for getting a ton of information into one space AND are super helpful for struggling writers because they can easily pull pieces from them to write sentences if needed.

You can also see two of the other books we used throughout today (one for a quick Read Aloud filler, the other for our non-fiction science lesson).

After verbalizing our knowledge about elephants, it was time to write!  I am just so proud of how far my little writers have come this year.

I love how matter-of-factly this friend let’s her reader know that elephants do not eat peanuts, LOL!

Here’s a look at a friend hard at work labeling the parts of an elephant.

If your class is visiting the zoo this Spring, I hope this will inspire you to get your kiddos brains soaking up knowledge about the animals that they will be seeing at the zoo!  Click the picture below to snag your freebie by downloading the product preview!

So I did a little bit of Kindergarten math this morning and found that there are only 40 39 (we can go ahead and scratch today off) school days left until summer break!  I’m so looking forward to some sun and relaxation.  Until then, however, it’s time to make the most of the little bit of time that I have left with the kiddos!

For Monday Motivation this week I wanted to share an Earth Day inspired craft that is perfect for reusing mismatched paper, old magazines, newspapers, etc.

It just so happened that last week our theme was the ocean.  Needless to say, we read “The Rainbow Fish” by Marcus Pfister.  If you don’t own a copy of this book, there is an awesome version from the Screen Actor’s Guild [here].  But I highly recommend keeping a hard copy on hand because of the shiny scales – the kiddos go crazy!

Long story short, we did some text-related activities with the story during our literacy block.  Then, we circled back to it during Science to talk about Earth Day!  We talked about what could happen to our oceans if we don’t take care of them.  We also talked about reusing items to make new items (IE: magazine strips into art :)!!)

This Earth Day activity is super simple and great for illustrating how we can re-purpose items to reuse them.  You will need:

• Animal of your choice printed on card stock (a fish is great if tying into “The Rainbow Fish”)
• Magazines cut into strips (be sure to get ride of any pages that may not be appropriate for school)
• Glue
• Scissors
• Glitter

To top off our art we had to add a single glittery scale!  This brought it all back to the read aloud from earlier, and you can’t go wrong with glitter!

Happy Monday, y’all!

Anyway, I’m not here today to talk about flowers.  But I am here to join some of my blogging buddies to share some great lesson ideas, apps, and other classroom must-haves!

This time of year it’s amazing to look back at where kiddos began and where they are now, and I’ve particularly been reflecting on writing lately.  I feel like I’ve been pretty darn successful this year on gradually releasing my kinder friends so that they can be awesome little writers – so I wanted to share a lesson idea that fits perfectly with Spring!

A couple of weeks back we did a unit on Weather.  When you’re doing a unit on weather, you have to talk about clouds, right?!  So I started thinking about how to help my little friends become more descriptive when writing about clouds (let’s be honest there was a lot of “Clouds are white.  Clouds are fluffy,” which is great but I wanted to push them a bit further).  I was inspired by Mrs. Schmelzer’s [blog post] from a while back.

Then I had a light bulb moment!  I remembered 2 awesome books that talk about the shapes that clouds can appear to take.  If you’ve never read “It Looked Like Spilt Milk” by Charles Shaw or “Little Cloud” by Eric Carle with your kiddos, please jump on it!

                         

I just think that they’re both such great options for discussing clouds that we read both!  After reading these stories we came up with a new list of describing words for clouds (much more expansive now).

Then came the fun part (and my secret way of motivating my little writers, shhhh!).  Each kiddo designed their own clouds using cotton balls and glue.

My classroom library has taken over the guest bedroom!  I guess my class library technically is a guest since I can’t move it into my new school until August.  I must admit that I’m pretty darn proud of myself!  I made it a goal for this summer to get my classroom library under control and organized, and I’m already off to a great start!

Right now I’ve just started separating all of my books into categories (animal fiction, Dr. Seuss, Disney, weather, holidays, etc.).  I’ve only been through one box so far and have 3 others to get through – I don’t have a large library, yet.  I went through this process last year, but didn’t label the books so my kiddos didn’t know where to put them back.  Lets just say the class library was in a bit of shambles by May.  You live and learn, and I won’t be making that mistake again.

Once I get through the other boxes I’ll figure out which stacks can be combined and what types of books I may need more of.  I will also pull books to go into a leveled library section, however I want the majority of my library to just be organized into categories so my kiddos get experience picking “just right” books.

So my question for you is, what summer teaching-related project or plans do you have?

You can head over and visit Christina from [Sugar and Spice] to link up your post and visit other bloggers’ Wordless Wednesday posts!