Top of the Mornin' to Ya!

On Monday, I began our morning message with the greeting "Top of the Mornin' to Ya!"  It was so fun to see them come in the rest of the week saying that to one another and tipping their imaginary hats!  Too cute!  

This week we learned about the symbols and traditions of St. Patrick's Day.  We read some Irish folk tales, made rainbows, and came very close to trapping a leprechaun!  It was a fun week!  

On Monday, we did a word study with the word "lucky".  Then we discussed the different things that make us lucky and wrote about them.  

We read Gail Gibbon's book about St. Patrick's Day.  It taught us about the history and symbols of the holiday.  We learned about leprechauns and we made these cute leprechaun masks!  

On Tuesday, we did some Skittles math.  We sorted our Skittles by color and made a graph.  Then, we used our data to make some addition sentences.  

On Wednesday we learned about fair shares using the book, "The Doorbell Rang".  We read the story and used the Mimio to practice sharing.  Then we used cereal to practice on our own.  

That afternoon, we reviewed ROY. G. BIV (the order of the colors of the rainbow), and made tissue paper rainbows.  They turned out beautiful!  

On Thursday, we did a leprechaun glyph and made a fair shares book to go inside him.  

On Thursday afternoon, we had an unexpected visitor!  A leprechaun came into our classroom and made quite a mess!  He turned things upside down and left glitter and gold all over!  He made a pile of green things on the carpet.  

He also left us some messages.  This one said "You will never get my gold!"

And this one said, "You can't catch me!"

Here is a video that shows our reactions when we discovered what had happened!  

After we got our classroom back in order, we decided to make some leprechaun traps.  We used styrofoam cups, clothes pins, and pennies to make our traps.  We set them up all over our classroom.  

When we came in the next morning, you won't believe what we found!  All of our traps had magically turned into little leprechaun hats.  They also left is some more gold!  But we didn't trap that sneaky leprechaun!  He fooled us again!  

During writing, we wrote a letter to our leprechaun.  It says, 

"Dear Parsley Leprechaun, Thank you for the gold.  Please do not mess up our classroom.  You are tricky.  Come back and we will be nice.  Love, Ms. Crowley's Class"  

Then we made wanted posters and hung them up in the hallways.  

To end our week of St. Patrick's Day fun, we made leprechaun punch.  We mixed Sprite and green sherbet.  Then we put some green sprinkles on top.  Yum!  

Even though we never caught the Parsley Leprechaun, we still had a lot of fun!  

What A Seusstastic Week!!

Whew!  What a busy week!  We celebrated Read Across America Week and Dr. Seuss' birthday.  We were reading machines this week!  We read over 800 pages!  Wow!  

Monday was "Cat in the Hat" day.  We wore red, black, and white and made hats.  After reading "The Cat in the Hat", we made text to self connections and wrote about what we do when it rains.  Then we read "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back" and compared it to the first one.  

For our Dr. Seuss bulletin board, we turned ourselves into the Cat in the Hat!  These turned out so cute!  

We also made handprint Thing One and Thing Twos.  

We also learned about -ing word endings.  We made these silly Thing Ones and wrote a sentence using an -ing word on their bellies.  Thank you to Deanna Jump's Dr. Seuss unit for this great pattern!  

That afternoon, Davis' grandma came to read a Dr. Seuss book to us.  She read "Oh the Thinks You Can Think".  It was so much fun!  We loved having her with us! 

Tuesday was pajama day!  We read the book "I Am Not Going to Get Up Today" by Dr. Seuss.  

During writing we wrote about why we wouldn't want to get out of bed.  Katelyn said that she didn't want to get out of bed because her bed is warm and cozy! 

Wednesday was crazy sock day!  

We read the book "Wacky Wednesday" and did a shared writing about things that would be wacky.  

That afternoon, Josie's grandma came to read to us!  She read the tongue twisting book "Oh Say Can You Say".  It was a fun book!  

She was also kind enough to bring us a special Dr. Seuss themed snack.  Green eggs and ham!  Yum!  

Thursday was hat day!  Everyone brought in their favorite hat.  

During math, we discussed the different ways we could sort the hats. 

Friday was "Green Eggs and Ham" day and storybook character day!  We began our morning by reading and watching "Green Eggs and Ham".  Then we made some green eggs and ham!  Everyone tried it and only one person didn't like the green eggs!  

After we ate green eggs and ham we headed down to Mrs. Karnes class to buddy read with third graders from Mrs. Tobin's class.  They read some of their favorite Dr. Seuss books to us.  We also got to show off our reading skills!  

Later in the day we had DEAR time.  DEAR stands for "Drop Everything and Read".  We read the books that went along with our character costumes.  

After lunch we went on a character parade through the cafeteria.  Here is a short clip of our parade!  

We had so much fun celebrating Dr. Seuss this week!  He is one of my favorite children's book authors.  I had so much fun sharing his stories with our class!  

Next week we will be learning about folk tales and St. Patrick's Day!  I can't wait!  

Famous African Americans

This week we learned about famous African Americans.  We began our week with George Washington Carver.  We read a biography about him and learned that he discovered many things that you could do with peanuts, including peanut butter!  We thought this was so interesting!  

Then, we learned about Duke Ellington, a famous jazz piano player.  We read this beautifully illustrated book by Andrea Davis Pinkney and then we listened to some of Ellington's music.  I gave each student a piece of paper, so that they could draw while they listened.  They described Ellington's music as smooth and beautiful.  This was shown through their drawings as well.  

Next, we learned about Harriet Tubman.  We read a biography about her and learned all about the Underground Railroad. 

On Friday, we learned about Garrett Morgan.  He was an African American inventor who invented the automatic stop sign, known now as the stoplight.  For our special snack, we made stoplights using graham crackers, strawberries, bananas, and kiwi.  Yum!  Thank you to everyone who sent in items for this snack!  

During writing this week, we learned about autobiographies and write our own.  We worked very hard on these!  On Friday, we shared our work with each other during an author share time.  They were so proud of their hard work!  

One of this weeks homework assignments was to create a timeline.  They turned out wonderfully!  We had such a great time seeing how everyone had grown and changed!  It is hard to believe that they are almost first graders!  

President's Day Fun!

We started out the week of President's Day learning about the father of our country, George Washington.  We read a biography about him and used a tree map to organize our new learning.  Later in the day, we used our tree map to help us do some nonfiction writing about Washington.  

The next day we learned about our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln.  Once again we used a tree map to organize our new learning.  During writing, we write a nonfiction piece about Lincoln and made these fun crafts!  

We compared Washington and Lincoln using a venn diagram.  We discussed their similarities and differences.  

We also did these fun directed drawings of the two famous Americans.  Thanks to Deanna Jump and her America unit for these fun activities!  

I love how they each turned out so different!  We have a class full of artists! 

We did a lot of fun President themed activities in math.  My favorite was measuring Abraham Lincoln.  The students used markers, unifix cubes, links, and pencils to measure his height.  They had a lot of fun with this!  

We also talked about our current president, Barack Obama.  We took a tour of the White House and wrote letters to the President.  

We had such a great time learning about Presidents!  We also had fun exploring biographies.  Next week we turn our focus to famous African Americans and autobiographies.