March 2013 – Patties Classroom

Peter Rabbit Pop Up Books

The week before Spring Break we read the famous children’s book The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter.

Did you know it is the most famous children’s book worldwide? Yes it is. I have 4 different copies from 4 different printings. Each has a different illustrator. But they all have the same text. I love this story.

It has a moral to the story that Peter should have obeyed his mother when she told him not to go into Mr. McGreggor’s garden. He disobeys and gets into all sorts of scary trouble. Shoulda minded his mama!

The kids color the pictures and do a simple retell and glue on pop up pictures of Peter in various situations in the garden. It always turns out really pretty.

I took a few pictures of some of them. The kids chose their own covers from pink, yellow, green or blue. Then they went to work constructing their pop up books. It only took 2 reading periods. They are pretty fast at any task I give them now.

They are proud of their pop up books.

Happy Easter Everybody! Hope you all get some good treats from the Easter Bunny!

Capacity Man or Gallon Guy

We did a fun activity as part of our measurement unit. It is called Capacity Man or Gallon Guy. This week we will be making Gallon Robot to teach cups, pints, quarts, and gallon. I start by having the kids watch the above video. I also have a poster in the class that shows cups, pints, quarts and gallons. So we have a little discussion. Then we look at Brainpop’s game on the web during our computer time. It’s a fun interactive game you can find HERE. My students love to learn these things and play them on the ipod too.

Gallon Guy Art Project

Gallon Guy is a kind of Capacity Man. It will help teach the different types and vocabulary for liquid measurements. Measurement is limited in our core, but since this is a gifted class of kids, I thought I would add capacity for enrichment, and also it is in our Envision Math series. I do like this Monster Math Guy a lot better. He has all the liquid capacity terms and you could have the kids copy him but make their own “monster” or “robot” art project just using the cups and pints and gallons in correct sizes but choose their colors and make their own monster face. You could call it your measurement monsters.

I found this cute pic at Squidoo HERE. It looks fun and easy.

We learned that 4 quarts = 1 gallon, 2 pints = 1 quart, 8 pints = 1 gallon, 4 cups = 1 quart, 16 cups = 1 gallon, etc.
This gives you the idea how to structure your own Capacity Man. I’m going to use similar sizes and colors to this guy to make for my classroom. A nice blackline master of all the shapes can be found HERE at Education World.

HERE at No Time For Flashcards I found this cute robot we could use as an idea of where to start on
our “Gallon Guy”. The kids could design their own robot faces for their gallon guy “robot” instead of the paper plate which looks kinda plain. Let’s be creative with our gallon guy! Plus we can get rid of some of our paper scraps in the process!

You’ll need 3 sheets of paper, each one a different color to make the cups, pints and quarts. Then I used a gray 8 x 9 piece for his head and a blue 10 x 10 piece for his body.

This cute rendition of Gallon Guy or Gallon Girl is from Coon Dogs.

The cutest one I found online was this one….It’s from HERE is a free download from Amber Polk at Adventures of a 3rd Grade Teacher. It is really cute. It’s a Gallon Man with the body of a Superhero! That would be so fun for my kids too. She has a download for the quart, pin, cup face and chest area. I’m thinking I’ll still do the robot head. Even though superhero is also a cute idea.

2 cups is a pint. 2 pints is a quart, 4 quarts is a gallon. 4 cups is a quart, 2 quarts is 1/2 a gallon. Kids can learn and memorize these Capacity Measurements with their Gallon Guy.

So HERE are OUR Capacity Robots. The kids named them everything from Gallon Guy and Gallon Girl to Gallon Bot 3000. They all turned out looking quite cute. I like the superhero idea too but I thought my little guys would do a better job making a creative robot face with scraps of recycled construction paper.

Here was my sample and our class brainstorm for names for the Gallon Robots. They each named their own guy.

Teaching Volume and Capacity through this art project was great!

Capacity Man, Gallon Man, Gallon Guy…it’s all the same…..

Some added necks and buttons to their Gallon Guy Robots too….

This one had 3D parts on the face…Love the Billy Bob “Bot” hehe…

Yes this gallonator looks like a Gladiator, doesn’t it?

Gallon Girl …but she’s having a bad hair day…..:

Gallon Girls and Guys – All the kids really understood capacity measurement after this activity….

SUPER gladiator! Eek! He’s a little scary looking!

We did 5 measurement centers to go along with our math unit in measurement this week. HERE is the link to our measurement centers.

Hope you enjoyed our Measurement Men!

The kids learned how to tell me how many cups, pints, and quarts were in a gallon. Her FREE LINK is HERE. It is by Amber Polk. It is really cute weather you go the superhero route or the robot route, both are great learning tools. And our robots turned out really fun!

St. Patrick’s Day Classroom Fun

HERE at Mathwire is a game I tweaked to fit my Leprechaun Day theme . It is a game called Math Parking Lot. I did a few cute graphics on the sides and am calling it Leprechaun Lot. I don’t know what kind of cars they drive, do you?

We did these cute POTS OF GOLD with Rainbows and a leprechaun riding the rainbow. We also wrote about “A Person I Treasure”. They turned out really pretty.

Evan Moore has a cute Leprechaun Shape book that would be a really fun to use for spelling. The words will go on 6 little rainbow paper strips we will make into rings and write each word twice on the front of each ring. And another word twice on the back. They will be able to do 12 words. Then we will hang them up on strings in our room for March. Cute right? HERE at Evan Moore is the shape book link. I just used the front and back and had the kids glue them together with the rings stapled to the bottom. They look cute hanging in our room. I should have taken a picture!

We did another writing assignment this week; we made up funny similes, a type of metaphor, to describe Leprechauns. My sentence frame went like this:

LEPRECHAUNS ARE AS ____________AS A ____________

and as ___________ as a __________. If I caught one I would trap him by…._____________. Then I would ask him for these 3 wishes; ____________, ___________, ____________.

My only directions were that each sentence had to have a describing word as well as each wish. They turned out wonderful!

Here is our Hallway Leprechaun bulletin board

We wrote metaphors….A leprechaun is as sly as a fox!

Then we made leprechaun heads…and glittered the buckles

The kids curled orange butcher paper around their pencils before gluing them down. I like how somebody thought theirs needed a mustache….hehehe…

I gave them each a piece of green glittery shamrocks to add to their hat.

Then we wrote the Leprechaun metaphors….and what we’d do if we caught a leprechaun.

How would YOU TRAP A LEPRECHAUN

Then we wrote what 3 wishes we would wish for….

They were very creative wishes!

Some wished for more than 3 wishes…that’s so tricky!

Here are the Pots of gold and rainbows too.

It’s always a lot of fun on St. Patrick’s Day!

Those nasty leprechauns…..they knocked over chairs, dumped out bins and
packs of crayons and even wrote a misspelled message on our board. Some
kids even found green footprints all over the bathroom sinks!

There is also a TPT St. Patty’s Day prompt writing page that is SUPER CUTE! It is from Kimberly Santana and she gives it out free on her TPT page. Well, we also made LEPRECHAUN TRAPS. Check them on the next post!

A fun 100s day chart to do with St. Patricks Day can be found at Little Country Kinder TPT store. Hope your St. Patty’s Day was filled with rainbows!

$2 Leprechaun Hundreds Chart Hidden Picture Activities for$

St. Patrick’s Day LEPRECHAUNS

This week is St. Patrick’s Day. So we did some LEPRECHAUNS! These were the ones we did last year. But this years are even bigger and better! And very GREEN!

I like to make cards for some of the holidays we celebrate. These always turn out cute. The handprints are orange paint. Then a die cut peach circle glued and the faces made by the kids. Top with a black hat, green strip of paper and a yellow square. The black inside part of the buckle is just made with black marker. Oh, and don’t forget the wiggly eyes.

Then we choose from 3 kinds of stationery and write cards to our parents.

Some really fun St. Patrick’s Day Pinwheels can be found HERE at Craft Jr. It is one of my favorite sites for crafts. This one was milk and food coloring and a little DAWN dish detergent on the end of a toothpick. It will fizzle the milk pretty good if you only touch here and there in the areas of the food coloring.

Here we are doing it in my class but watch the video below to see how it’s done. I use toothpicks and only touch the very edges one at a time of the dots of food coloring. It will fizz and last longer.

They are cool rainbow experiments to go along with your Pots of Gold! Check it out HERE to find out how to make green Leprechaun Quicksand (Oobleck).

I made this Leprechaun and Shamrock BINGO last year for the kids to play at a center. They use the green glittery shamrocks as counters. It is filled with lots of cool vocabulary.

Gotta play a few games of Irish Bingo for St. Patrick’s Day!

And we ALWAYS make leprechaun trap inventions. They are very cool and we show them off in the school library for a week. Kids have lots of fun trying to “LURE” a leprechaun to our class. I’ll post them on Friday when they are due along with some of our writing leprechaun metaphor writings.

And we graph our favorite type of potatoes in math. It could be potato chips that win this year! That’s my downfall…..sigh…..

Happy St. Patricks Day!

Dr. Seuss Day Fun

We read many books by Dr. Seuss wearing our pajamas on Dr. Seuss Day!

We made cool HATS! with the Read Across America Pledge on the back!

We danced with THING 1 and THING 2!

And then of course we had to paint THING 1 AND 2 using our handprints!

We played games and did a few contests too!

We had fun dancing and doing some Dr. Seuss Trivia with Mrs. Robert’s Classroom.

Then we got some fun suckers from the PTA! They were so cool!

Here is Brody in his cool “Trouble 2” Shirt. It looks like Thing 2!

Some kids answered the Trivia questions for some cool prizes!

Here we are doing the Trivia Challenge. Did you know Dr. Seuss wrote over 40 books for kids?

Thing 1 and Thing 2 also read stories to us!

Then we got to go to the cafeteria for some Dr. Seuss Cake cut up by the PTA ladies.

Doesn’t it look delish? Well, it was. Thanks PTA! Here’s our cute PTA President. She works so hard!

Rhyming Game
It rhymes with call.
If I trip over my shoelace I could ———(fall)
It rhymes with hall.
It’s round and it bounces-it is a —–(ball)
It rhymes with wish
You put food in it. It is a —-(dish)
It rhymes with that
You wear it on your head. It is a —-(hat)
It rhymes with pat
It’s not a kitten, it’s a —–(cat)
It rhymes with run
Up in the sky, there is a —(sun)
It rhymes with sun
If you’re having a good time, you’re having–(fun)
It rhymes with snake
You put frosting on it. It is a——(cake)
It rhymes with cup
The opposite of down is—-(up)
It rhymes with sunny
When something makes you laugh, it is—–(funny)
it rhymes with not
You cook soup in a ——(pot)
It rhymes with say
The opposite of night is——(day)
It rhymes with away
When you use your toys, you—(play)
It rhymes with hop
The opposite of go is—(stop)

Source: Hummingbird Educational Resouces

Handprint Thing 1 and Thing 2 for Dr. Seuss Day!

We also read Green Eggs and Ham chorally. It was fun as tables reading parts to each other.

We made a list of rhyming word sets to write up some easy and wacky poems with! That was lots of fun. Dr. Seuss made some wacky poems. It is easy to do!

“I do not like Green Eggs and Ham, Sam I am! We even had green eggs and ham in the cafeteria for lunch! We had lots of characters running around school giving out stuff. It was a blast.

Thanks Dr. Seuss. You made reading SO FUN! We had lots of good fun that was funny!

Phases of the Moon and The Night the Moon Fell

This video was the way I introduced our new Science Unit on Phases of the Moon. Our weekly Reading Streets story; The Night the Moon Fell was our literature story. It is a cute myth that describes changes in the moon. It is a very beautifully illustrated story but maybe a bit hard for the kids to understand since it is a myth.

I also do a class choral reading of the story How the Moon Regained Her Shape legend. Both are literary stories that deal with how the moon changes shape. Here are some other books we read throughout the week. Some are fiction, others are non fiction. I also have an Uncle Milty’s Moon in my Room. That’s fun to light up.

I have about 5 more moon books I use to teach the science. We just read one each day during the unit. Kids ask lots of questions in my class and we have good discussions. Lots of kids already have a broad knowledge of space since it interests them. HERE is a link that shows a calendar with pictures of each phase of the night moon in a given month. A fun oreo cookie activity with worksheets is a free download at the TPT store of Hilary Lewis HERE. It takes 8 cookies per kid. That’s a lot of cookies!

I have a flashcard game I give out where one kid has the set with phase names in words, the other kid has the pictures. He picks up a picture, tries to name the phase and the other kid checks his card for accuracy. It’s a fun partner game and only 2 pieces of paper per partnership! Laminate them with black paper on the back to keep them nice for next year. Moon Phase Flashcards are here.

I just leave these books out at our “Science Investigation Center” with 3D glasses and kids read the books after seatwork is done as a fast finisher activity.

PLUTO ROCKS is a cool website I found where the guy who discovered Pluto’s 2 new moons will let anybody help him name the 2 moons! So we went online in the lab and voted to name the moons. There were about 12 names to choose from. Some kids got their 1st choice!! What a neat thing to say you have been a part of (about 450,000 around the world participated in the vote, as did our class)! Woo Hoo! And it coincides with the Moon story in our Reading Streets Literature series.

A really nice Moon Phases freebie at Education.com is a great project for teaching kids the different phases of the noon. Scholastic has a great little mini book to copy too. But the thing the kids loved best was a flip book find it HERE at Utah Ed Network. It was fun to cut, staple and flip to see the changes in the moon in 29 days.

I have the MOON IN MY ROOM above that I bought to go with this science unit. I turn out the lights and have the kids all sit around in a circle and look at the ceiling. It is a lot of fun but not so easy to store.
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In my classroom I also have MOONSAND I bought years ago. The kids LOVE it. Recently I found a recipe to make your own moonsand. It is kind of a waxy sand that you can pinch into shapes and use molds and it stays that way. Lots of fun!

MOON SAND RECIPE

4 cups of fine play sand (You can buy a bag at Home Depot)

2 cups cornstarch

3/4 to 1 cup water (less is better for spongier moonsand)

drops of food coloring to desired color

Or just buy it like I did I think at Target or else Steve Spangler Science. I get a lot of my fun things there. He has so many great ideas to make learning more fun.

Mama, Do You Love Me? Eskimo Activities

We just finished our Amazing Arctic Adventures using the book “Mama Do You Love Me” as the springboard to learn about the Inuit People of Alaska.

We wrote stories after watching some videos about the Eskimos and the Iditarod and life in the North.

We called them Amazing Arctic Adventures……

Here are some of the book I bought on Amazon and a Scholastic News we read. I also bought DOGTEAM BY Gary Paulsen which has beautiful illustrations by his wife and talks about the dogsled races of Alaska like the Iditarod.

File Folder Fun had some cute matching activities to identify the animals of the arctic I copied the matching game on 5 different colors of cardstock and gave 1 set out to each table to introduce the new mini unit. They worked cooperatively to match up all the Arctic Animals. Great game! One that was too easy for my group but has homophone matching with igloos and eskimos is HERE at File Folder Fun.

Here is our finished Watercolor “Northern Lights” and Arctic Animals Adventure stories

The Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights

Watercolor Polar Bear, wolf and igloo made a pretty Northern Lights nightscape.

This video above is about 8 minutes and it shows how hard and simple the life of the traditional Inuit people are. It shows the children eating raw seal meat like candy. The kids were enthralled by it. I read them a few library books with Arctic Animal facts too.

Mama do you Love Me? by Barbara M. Joosse is such a sweet book. I have the tape too. So we listened to the tape and I had a copy of the text for kids to read along with the tape. There are kayaks, dogsleds, icebergs, lots of good vocabulary words.

I showed the kids this cool short 2 minute video on the winner of the 2012 IDITAROD RACE showing what “Mushing” is really like!

Winter Writing project called Arctic Adventures.

Beautiful Northern Lights watercolor pictures

ART A cool arctic snowy owl art project I found at Family Fun and it uses pine cones and pillow fiberfill. I have an old pillow I think I will rip open and bring to school to use up the pine cones I’ve been saving and make some cool snowy owls.

Loved this one too from LKSD.org. It gave me an inspiration for some of our our art projects below.

MATH Make multiplication problems on the dogs and eskimos and answers on the dogsleds for a fun math match-game. SPELLING Another cute art project I found and the link is HERE at Heidisongs.com. You could white out the SIGHT words she has OR put your own spelling words for the week inside the picture instead. That’s what I’m doing. I love linking my spelling activity to what we are learning about.

It looks like she used a coffee filter around the eskimo head…CUTE and EASY!

My inspiration for these lovely watercolors and polar bears is from That Artist Woman’s website where she did some polar bear winter landscapes with first graders using watercolor paper, paint and gesso HERE.

MUSIC

I have a pretty song I play in my classroom called “Northern Lights”. HERE. and I typed up the words And I have a book I read the kids called The Fiddler of the Northern Lights by Natalie Warnock HERE. Both are great. I have also collected lots of animal blacklines from color books of arctic animals, inuit people, dogsleds and igloos. My goal is to teach the kids about life in the far north; the land of the eskimos and the Northern Lights.

More books we read as we were writing and finishing the Arctic Animals unit this week. The whole thing took us 2 weeks of writing time to finish.

VOCABULARY CROSSWORD PUZZLE Puzzlemaker Online will help you make a crossword puzzle with words to go with your Arctic animal unit VOCABULARY. Here are the words I used to make mine. Inuit/people of the arctic polar/white arctic bear fox/tricky white animal snowshoe hare/white bunny northern lights/colors in the sky snowy owl/talons and beak bird caribou/cousin of the reindeer narwhal/whale with a long, pointy tusk walrus/ocean animal with whiskers seals/polar bears and eskimos love to eat me eskimo/inuit people dogsled/team of animals for racing iceberg/big ice flow Iditarod/dogsled race in Alaska Arctic/cold area of the North. OR just check out the one I made HERE at puzzle-maker.

Pretty good story writing going on here. We shared each other’s stories in class when we were finished.

Then we made a cool bulletin board. I love the watercolor below showing all the arctic animals in Mason’s story with the Alaskan huskie dog, a snowshoe hare and a wolf. They were all “friends” Nobody wants to eat each other in 2nd grade fiction!

In our “Arctic Adventures” we brainstormed possible problems living in the arctic, and some solutions to those problems. The setting was somewhere in Alaska or Canada, Greenland, or Iceland. The characters could be any Arctic animals or the Eskimo Inuit people.

I think they turned out wonderful and very creative. And the combined pictures look so pretty too. What do YOU THINK?