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.

Disney World Letters

About a month ago all of the kids wrote letters to their favorite Disney World character so we could get practice writing letters. They've been anxious ever since about getting a reply and we finally got one yesterday!! They sent the whole class back this letter:

Then on top of that, each child got their own autographed post card. One was all the Disney Princesses and the other was all the Mickey characters. I didn't get a picture of the Princesses before the kids left but here is the Mickey ones. I also posted a picture of the address to Disney if this is something your class would be interested in doing!

Spring Door

Wow! When you start teaching you really have no down time so it took me literally two weeks to get the picket fence up but now the door is totally done! The tree used to be twisted paper and it made it look 3D (was pretty cool) but unfortunately we don't have strong enough tape to keep it up so it was a constant battle to keep it up so I just redid it.

Classroom Organizer

Have you ever seen this resource? It's really cool and I love it! You use the barcode scanner on your phone, tablet, or iPod to scan the barcode on the back of a book and it instantly adds it to an online library where you can look up and manager the books in your classroom. I know a lot of teachers who spent time typing up all of the books they have in their room but this is SO much faster!
This can also be used in the class for students to check out your books if you need a library management system! I highly recommend it. It took about two hours for me to get all my books in but now it's really great because anytime I get new books it only takes a few seconds to add them to my account.

http://classroom.booksource.com/

The Water Cycle

In Science we are currently learning about the water cycle which will lead into our next chapter on weather. I wanted to create a reference for students to be able to look at throughout the day to remind them what we had learned so far. I created the background and hung it by the classroom door. Then each time we learned one of the new vocabulary words we added it to the picture where it would go. I used this as a tool when we were waiting in line to leave for our specials and asked students the vocabulary words that were posted on the window at that time. Then because it had been there throughout the whole chapter, when we took our quiz the students were able to refer to it during it. The definitions aren't posted anywhere near it so it was more of a visual representation to help students remember and recall.