Month: April 2011

Peter Rabbit Pop Up Books

Every Easter time I read my kids THE most popular children’s Easter book in the world; Peter Rabbit. I remind the kids that the problem in the story was that Peter did not mind his mommy. And because he didn’t mind, he got himself in a heap of trouble. And I ask them to listen for the ending where his brothers and sisters get rewards for being good, and he loses his reward and has to go to bed with no dessert.

                           Now I happen to have 3 copies with 3 different illustrators of this delightful Beatrix Potter book. All 3 have the same text with very little variation, but the pictures are all very different. The oldest book I bought for my own children many years ago. It is very dog earred.. It was published in the early 60s. I think Ms. Potter is long gone now, but her books are absolutely timeless. I bought the whole gift boxed set of all of her little stories in little pastel 7 x 9 hardback size. They are super cute! The students love to look at the cute pastel pictures and they love the darling characters.

A flannel board story you can download at this link HERE at For Shared.com. It would be a cute addition to this activity.


I copy the cover on pink, green, yellow and blue construction paper for the kids to choose…

                                                   

So I have 2 kids in my class hold up the 2nd and 3rd books and I shoot my favorite one from the document camera to the wall and we compare the scenes that take place in Mr. McGregor’s Garden with the naughty little Peter Rabbit getting himself in trouble.



Mommy Bunny and Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail Bunny…and Peter….


After reading, the kids do a simple retell using pop up papers. It is easy if you can do the clip art in the background and just have 1 pop up per page. I used to do 3 pop ups on a page and I would tear my hair out trying to get around to help everybody as they glued backwards, sideways and upside down. I decided that wasn’t very much fun! for anybody! So this way everybody is successful. (It is still a hard project for first graders….but they are SO proud of it when it is done!)
                                                 



Mr. McGregor’s Garden

                                                     

Page 1 retells the mommy’s warning to Peter before she goes to town. Page 2 tells about his obstacles in the garden where he meets up with Mr. MeGregor, the grumpy old farmer. Page 3 tells about the scarecrow McGregor makes from his little blue coat after Peter escapes. There really should be a page 4, for a great conclusion, but it’s taxing enough to do a 3 page pop up book.



Fun Language Art Activity for Peter Rabbit

                                                   

ThenThe pop up on each page is Peter dressed differently each time. The 2nd and 3rd bunny are just clip art. The kids color, cut out and glue the pop ups.  Then we glue them all together. (very tricky!) we add a construction paper cover and color the cover. It’s such a fun activity for a favorite retell.
Then we put them up on our Spring bulletin board for a week.

SONG:

 

Rechenka’s Eggs Spring Bulletin Board

Onion domed churches of Moscow

Here in Utah we have Easter Break really late this year. So I actually get to use all my Easter crafts! Woo Hoo!  But I am longing for a break and some better weather. This year we made spring flowers, Easter chicks and Rechenka’s eggs in a basket. 




I love the story Rechenka’s Eggs by Patricia Polacco. It’s got the character Babushka from our L.A. basal reader story Thundercake. So the kids easily spotted the “text to text” connection of characters. She’s an old Russian lady who crafts beautifully painted Easter eggs to go to market for a festival in Moscow. It show the onion domes of the Moscow capital city all in their splendorous colors.

                                                                                 
                                                                                                                                                       It reminds me of when we went to visit Armenia  and we had to stop over in Moscow to catch a small commuter plane.(word to the wise, never fly Aeroflot Airlines…we had a fuel line break in mid flight and almost blew up right over Budapest! not fun) Our flight was late so they had to put us up in this creepy Moscow hotel with barbed wire around it. The grumpy looking Russian in the fur hat who taxied us to the hotel never spoke a word to us.
                                                                                                         

 I remember begging him to drive us up to Moscow to see the Kremlin. Silly me, I thought it would be like a fun little tourist side trip. Little did I know that they don’t even give day visas to tourists! When we got to the hotel, they placed a guard at a little desk outside our door. Since we were Americans they did not trust us I guess. And the only thing on TV was this creepy song sung in an Asian voice all about “It’s Time For Us” and it still gives me Heeby Jeebies thinking about it. Yuck. I’m NOT a good traveler.

Here’s a close up of one of the eggs, and Andrew’s Spring poem…

Anyway, then I had made copies of some really decorated eggs we called ” Rechenka’s Eggs” and I have a contest to see who can make the most beautiful eggs to send to the Moscow market. The top 3 eggs win a prize. I don’t like to do this very often or the kids start asking “What do we get for doing this?” you know how old THAT gets. But contests do bring out a bit more motivation to do an excellent job.

We’ve added about 20 more eggs since this picture….it looks real pretty now!

I typed up this poem to sing and put on the back of our Spring Chicks…

Then I brought in some plastic eggs for each table in a basket. It will be a center activity all next week. They look at the number on the outside of the egg. Inside they write all the addends (addition number sentences) and factors (multiplication number sentences) that would end in that number.  The kids will be creative I know!


Spring Acrostic Poem by Saige…..turned out sweet!


Then we talked about the season of Spring and read a book called It’s Spring by Linda Glaser. It has beautiful illustrations and it was a good springboard for a brainstorm on the board of spring things that start with the letters S-P-R-I-N-G. They are really good at brainstorms now, although somebody thought rhinoceros would be a good spring word…hehe.

Kate’s poem….very cute….

Then I had them write sloppy copies with all these wonderful S and P and R words on the board like sunshine, storms, pretty flowers, potted plants, rainbows and raincoats.

Easter Chick craft….Moby Chick

Pink crepe paper cheeks, wiggly eyes, square orange beak and triangle at the bottom  legs.



Easter Chicks made from traced hands….we added orange feathers to the tops!

 Then I edited their simple poems and then handed them this cute printed poetry form for the SPRING Acrostic.  Lastly I showed them how to put together the little spring chicky art project. We had a funny poem called Moby Chick we added on the back and read and sang together to the tune of Itsy Bitsy Spider.

I just couldn’t resist putting this little Easter “Chick” on my blog….it’s my granddaughter Josie! peep peep!

Easter Crafts and Easter Art

 Here’s how our finished bulletin board looks!  Spring is so bright and beautiful! I love it! And boy is it raining hard and thundering loud today.  Snow one day and 30 degrees, Sun and 70 degrees the next, wind and rain and thunder with lightening the next! What the heck?! CRAZY weather! Can’t wait for SPRING BREAK!!!

April Fool’s Day Activities

“The first of April is the day we remember
what we are the other 364 days of the year.”~By Mark Twain~    Don’t ya love it?

A teacher friend of mine always dressed up in a long black wig and old lady clothes and changed her voice when kids came in on April Fools Day.  She had a wart and fake teeth and she told them all that she was the new teacher Miss Viola Swamp, a cousin of their teacher, hence the resemblance. She’d stomp around demanding they work hard today and that she was very strict. By the time the kids were a little tense, she’d bring out this book. Then she’d read them the story Miss Nelson is Missing.  It is the story of a teacher who dresses up and is kind of scary until the kids figure out it is really their teacher in costume.

This year for April Fools Day I thought we could make a fun Joke Book.

I have collected many joke books over the years so I typed up a list of jokes they could use.  We spent about 15 minutes copying some jokes they chose onto this cute stationery with a little laughing man on top. Then I copied everybody else’s sheet of jokes and made enough for the whole class.

 We are making them into a whole class joke book. The cover is a giant smile with teeth. It will be cute . On Monday we will have to share our joke books with each other!

Here is the cute paper we use to write our funny jokebooks. 

Some fun math activities can be found at this link HERE. Happy APRIL FOOLS DAY! 

Thermometers and Temperature.

We start our lesson on temperature by making a thermometer. A link for a simple thermometer is HERE found at Havefunteaching.com. I make one so kids can color a red strip and tape it together so it is long. Then we cut “slits” in the top and bottom of it and our red strip becomes the rising and falling temperature in our thermometer. 

On the thermometer there is Hot, Warm, Cool, and Cold.  The kids can easily learn what degrees are “hot” degrees, and which ones are cool and cold. We practice moving our “red strip” up and down as we say, “now it’s HOT! So what’s the temperature today? Now it’s cold, what’s the temperature today?”
Then I show the kids pictures of bathing suits, coats and gloves, tank tops and shorts and sweatshirts and ask what weather and degrees they would wear each piece of clothing in? They have to flash me one of 4 words with degrees shown below on our papers. They color and cut them out and wave them to me as I show the sweatshirts and tank tops.

weather temps and thermometer….

That’s always a fun activity and it helps the kids memorize the different temperatures a bit better.  I teach them what we would do and wear in 1) 90 degree HOT weather, and 2) 70 degree WARM weather, 3) 50 degree COOL weather and 4)  30 degree COLD weather.

hats and raincoats…what kind of weather?

                                  Wacky Weather POETRY WRITING:
I’ve used the book title “Oh Say Can You Say…What’s the Weather Like Today?” as a beginning line for rhyming poems. Kids brainstorm the words that will rhyme with today. (play, May, ray, clay, they, pray, tray, way, say, day, they etc). Then they write funny rhymes.  It is wacky but fun.

This year we did Weather Words by Gail Gibbons and we made “rain” poems using our 5 senses.  When it rains I see, When it rains I hear, When it rains I smell, touch, taste etc. We brainstorm lists under the words hear, see, smell, touch, etc. Then the kids write a sloppy copy. I walk around and edit for spelling. Then they rewrote them on cute stationery with rain clouds above. Pics are below….

Here’s a finished thermometer

 They turned out very pretty. Then we did a water cycle wheel and we talked about all the vocabulary like accumulation, precipitation, and evaporation. Our rain poems go right along with the water cycle!  We are just about done with weather! Woo Hoo!

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5 Senses Poetry



Rain Poems…..

Water Cycle Music  (tune: “It’s Raining, it’s pouring)      
It’s raining, it’s pouring,
The oceans are storing
Water from the falling rain
While thunderclouds are roaring.
The rain now is stopping,
The rain’s no longer dropping.
Sun comes out and soaks up water
Like a mop that’s mopping.
The water’s still there now,
But hidden in the air now.
In the clouds it makes a home
Until there’s rain to share now.
It’s raining, it’s pouring…
Meish Goldish

Here are the Water Cycle Wheels we made….super great for a visual understanding…

It’s always fun in my class to sing to percussion instruments. I’ve got drums, wood blocks, tambourines, shakers, boomwhackers, xylophones and sticks. So when it’s time to do a rap or sing, we do percussion too.

POETRY: Weather is Hot, Weather is Cold  RAP!                                                                           ,
Weather is hot,   (snap your fingers as your recite it together)
Weather is cold,
Weather is changing
As the weeks unfold.
Skies are cloudy,
Skies are fair,
Skies are changing
In the air.
It is raining,
It is snowing,
It is windy
With breezes blowing.
Days are foggy,
Days are clear,
Weather is changing
Throughout the year!
by:  Meish Goldish

Well that’s the end of our weather unit for this year. I only wish the actual weather was better by now! It snowed again!