Earth Day with The Lorax

Our school is celebrating Earth Day with all day events on the 19th. To prepare for Earth Day, we watched an online reading of The Lorax on YouTube and discussed what the message in the story was about. We then created a list of ways that people could help make our Earth better. Then the students wrote down if they were the Lorax what they would do to help preserve the Earth. Then they cut out a mustache and eyebrows and I tapped them onto a picture of each student and hung them on their lockers. They turned out pretty cute in the end! 

Similes

We started working on similes and metaphors this week. For the similes lesson I had students first understand what a simile is by giving a definition of it and having them brainstorm phrases using "like" or "as" that could be similes. After they understood what a simile was, I put up an anchor chart with the title "The Pop Rocks Exploded..." on the board. I handed out a small amount of pop rocks to each student and at the same time they all put them in their mouths. After the rocks had stopped popping, we came up with similes that described how the similes exploded in their mouths. Here are some of the things they came up with:

After the whole-group instruction  I broke up the class up into small groups and each group got their own poster with a saying on it. They had to finish the saying using a simile to explain the subject on their poster. They came up with some pretty good expressions!

Phases of the Moon!

We're finishing up our lesson on the solar system and the phases of the moon are the last chapter. For a hands on activity I bought generic Oreo cookies from Wal-Mart and gave each student 8 cookies (8 phases of the moon). While we talked about the phase of the moon from the textbook the kids got to bite off the parts of the top cookie to make it look like that phase of the moon. After the lesson I went around and checked everyone's phases to make sure they were correct and then they got to eat them for snack.