The Bear Lake Classic Bike Race

This weekend John had his favorite bike race up in Garden City; The Bear Lake Classic! It is a 51 mile bike race around Bear Lake up near Logan Utah.  I love to go with him since we bought our cabin up there 2 years ago because I get to hang out on the deck and watch the bikers come down near our house as the finish line is about a 1/2 mile away. 

Johnny is #925 in the Bike Race

Last year John was on the Cafe Rio Team. This year he decided to be a loner, I guess. Here he is just before we parked the truck to go get his number for the race.  He had to play Dire Straits on the CD player before he got out of the car. “Mood Music” Or maybe just “getting pumped up music”. It was pretty cute. I’ve never been an athlete so I don’t get that part I guess. I was just an interested bystander.


He’s making fun of me cuz I don’t know how to work a video camera. :O The next video they are about the 9th group to go out. There must have been 250 bikers in the whole race. I even saw kids in the race.

 Johnny has #925 on his back…

He finished the race in about 2 3/4 hours. He did better than last year. I stayed in the cabin and watched a movie and read some magazines. Then when he came back he took a hot bath and we ate lunch. Then we had to get down to Heber for my good friend Heidi’s wedding reception. We passed through the thriving metropolis of Randolph, Utah. Look at this “Smallest Store in Utah” pic I took. So funny!



It is crazy! This tiny store looks like a Tuff Shed!

We passed by some sheep, cows and antelope. I tried to snap pictures while we were going 60 mph. That doesn’t work too well as it turns out!



Where the deer and the antelope play?



I’m thinking the antelope didn’t like John’s choice of Leonard Skinnerd on the CD player? They skeedaddled!

 We have not so fond memories of Randolph, Utah.  John got a ticket last summer when our boat died in the middle of Bear Lake and the rangers towed us in. Did you know you needed oars and a whistle on a boat? Oh yes, AND a fire extinguisher? Yeah we didn’t either. We got a ticket! That was nice of those rangers.  So you can’t just pay the ticket. You HAVE to go appear before the judge! So I had a Monday furlough day off the day John had to appear so I went along to watch the fun.



The tiny Randolph, Utah courthouse (Kangaroo court)



 Jeez you wouldn’t believe it unless you’d been there. It was like that show Night Court! The judge had cowboy boots and a flannel shirt on! I said kinda loudly “THAT’S the judge?” and John elbowed me in the ribs. hehe  But they had bailiffs, a bouncer cop, lawyers for the county, clerk of the court, the whole 9 yards. Then they read every little offense you made in front of like 50 kids sitting in this miniscule courtroom that had all been busted for drinking (underage) on the beach It was crazy! Then dramatically, the judge says that all these offenses (including no insurance on the boat, who knew you needed insurance? NOT us obviously) they all added up to $400 bucks fine. WTH! 

We stopped here the day of the ticket and inquired about getting a giant teepee for our grandkids at this fun little shop!

John in his good natured way told the story of he and I packing a nice picnic and then getting stranded in the middle of Bear Lake on our boat. And finally calling a ranger and giving him our GPS address, he  towed us in and gave us a  ticket. So everybody laughed in the whole courtroom! Even the judge was caught laughing. 

This giftshop in Randolph seriously is a 12 x 12 building with a gazillion gifts of every type inside!

John was sitting next to a guy in a blue jumpsuit who was handcuffed.  He almost asked him, “what crime did you commit?” It is only funny now. At the time it was very quiet and serious in the courtroom. Anyway, the judge read off that John had purchased insurance that very morning, like an hour before we met in court, he read off the exact time and just looked at him. I felt pretty sorry for him at that moment. I slid a little lower in my seat at the back. He saw from the fax our insurance agent had sent to the courthouse!


We saw lots of deer as we drove down Highway 80



 That started another loud guffaw of laughter in the courtroom. By then all the clerks and cops were laughing too It was kind of a slap in the face to the “system”. I was wondering if this was daily fare for the court people. But the judge started chuckling too after John just smiled and admitted it all. Then the judge gave John some fierce advice about oars and whistles and he knocked the charge down to a $100 fine. It was a total embarrasment to us as we both slinked out of that courtroom. The strong arm of the law and all that.

Windmills for sale along the road…

Anyway we were on our way through all these small towns and it started really raining hard with lightening and thunder. We were almost to Evanston and I saw this cute little windmill advertising in a little old farmer’s yard. There were big windmills and cute tiny ones.  I’d like to get one of those for my cabin…very cute!

We stopped for a snack at McDonalds and returned our Redbox movie too. Did you know you could return Red box movies even interstate? We rented it in Utah and returned it in Wyoming!

Everything is so green too! Spring has finally sprung!
I noticed all the rivers were right up to the edge! EEK, floodin’ may be a’comin

We went past Echo Reservoir and I remembered having our whole family together there the first time we took out our jet skiis. All the boys could get up on the older ones where you have to get to your knees first and then try to stand. Those were fun times. Good memories.

Echo Reservoir…a fun place to go boating in the summer!

We finally got to Park City and turned off to go through to the small valley of Heber, Utah.


Beautiful green Heber…It’s one of my most favorite towns!

 

Snapped this pic out the car window…so green and pretty!




 I wrapped up a pretty wrought iron and glass beverage dispenser and we went to the reception. It was in this million dollar vacation home in Heber. It had the most beautiful view which I forgot to take a picture of. We met up with lots of friends and had a great time. The bride and groom looked so happy together.



Cute Couple!

They had little crabcake appetizers with corn salsa in little clam shells…mmmm yummy!



Eric Olson and Layne Halverson kept us in stitches telling stories (both are business owners) of finding skunks, racoons, and bats in other people’s homes and how they went about getting rid of them, or working with them. Too funny!

Yummy salads and salmon and grilled meats…so delish!
We really laughed at the racoon and gopher stories…the guys were so funny!




Heidi and Alex…Congrats you guys!

  All in all it was a very fun weekend spent doing stuff we love with good friends and yummy food. Life is good.

Farm Stories (Plants, Seeds, Gardening)



Kids this age love farm animals so much. We went to the zoo for a field trip last year and the kids talked about the animals for weeks afterwards.  We are starting a unit on plants and seeds so talking about farms and farmers  is one way to introduce the topic.  So we sing  “THE FARMER IN THE DELL!”


I have a Farmer in the Dell game I bring out for the kids once  a year where they become the characters in the song. It’s a stuffed version of the I bought at a teacher convention that has the farmer, the wife, the child, the nurse, the dog, etc. And the kids hold them as they go around the inside of a giant circle during P.E. and pick their friends to walk around in the circle with them. My class is so small though that everybody is in the circle just about, by song’s end!

Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert  is such a terrific book. I LOVE the artwork in it. It’s an interesting and quick read about what grows in this garden. It’s filled with super colorful illustrations of many different kinds of flowers and how they grow from different kinds of seeds.  It is a perfect springboard to a study of plants and seeds. We always plant something in small, clear cups so the students can see the roots growing out of the seeds.  It’s a cool process to watch. We also have grow lights, so that makes things grow even faster and healthier. They were a gift to our school from the Red Butte Garden’s outreach program in Salt Lake City, Utah.  Very nice of them if you ask me!

                                            

We finished our flower garden mural showing parts of a flower plant….

SCIENCE

Growing Vegetable Soup by Lois Ehlert is a great book for going through the process of planting vegetables from seeds to veggies, to making soup! I bought some seed packets for many different veggies and flowers and I’ll let the kids choose. After we fill their clear cups with potting soil, and they pick their seeds, we water them and label them with popsicle sticks. so they remember what they are growing 😀  kids LOVE to  have their choice of seeds to plant and LOVE even more seeing what happens over the weeks of growing.

 There are so many jobs on a farm to do.  As a city kid, I was fascinated going to visit my Uncle Merle’s  farm in Iowa and seeing the silo, the automated grain feeders and how they grow popcorn. City kids love farms!
Alphabet Soup Rap (snap or clap)
Reader 1 : A-B- CDE, Down on the farm is where I want to be!
Reader 2: F-G- HIJ, Milking the cows and bringing in the hay!
Reader 3 : K-L- MNO, Where trees and plants from seedlings grow!
Reader 4: P-Q- RST, Riding a horse across fields so free!
Reader 5: U-V- WXY, But it’s time to leave and say good-bye!
All: Z-Z- ZZZ,  Down at the farm is where we want to be! Ye Ha!

Copy and glue this on the back of the farm scene for a shared reading/singing activity.

Pop up books we made before Spring Break

Naughty little Peter Rabbit, running through the vegetable garden….

ROOT VIEWER – Kids love to watch the roots growing…

We finished making Peter Rabbit story pop up books before Easter break. They depict Mr. McGreggor’s Garden.  They always turn out super cute. So this is a perfect time to introduce the plant and seed unit we do in our K-2 core.  I have a Root Viewer set so kids can see 3 different veggies growing inside.
A few years ago I won my root viewer from a teacher science workshop. It is a really fun addition to my plant and seed unit.  It shows the roots growing in the long, clear tubes and kids like that. Then we all planted our own plants in recycled soup and vegetable cans and we covered them with cute scrapbook paper.

AUTHOR STUDY: I love the author Joy Cowley because her books always have a surprise ending. Mrs. Wishy Washy is a big book by Joy Cowley most of my students got last year in Kindergarten. So I tell them that the fun author has written lots of other stories like The Rusty, Trusty Tractor we will be reading. They all love Mr. and Mrs. Wishy Washy.  I wonder if we wrote a class letter to Joy Cowley if we would get a response back? Hmmm….. LOIS ELHERT is another great author we will study her 2 books above in our plant and seeds unit.  She does quite a few good science books that are excellent for introducing the topic.

 ART PROJECT
Copy off and have kids cut out a construction paper red barn from clip art. Glue some yellow crinkled, shreded paper onto the front of the barn like hay falling out of a window. Then choose blue or yellow background paper. Color and have the kids choose which animals to glue around their”Farmer in the Dimple Dell” barn collage. We will take pictures in cowboy hats and bandanas around our necks and use them as our farmer selves on a green, John Deere tractor, (or in our case “Vera Deere”, or ” Matt Deere” tractors of course!! The wheels we had help cutting out with fancy scissors and then a brad in each yellow circle “just for the hubcap look”.  I just used PHOTOBOOTH on my school laptop to take instant pictures of all the kids in hats and then printed them directly into the computer lab color computer. Super easy! But they are not super clear. They look like a cross between black and white and color, but they will do in a pinch. I found the farm animals and the barn and the writing paper in one of the Scholastic Monthly Idea Books.

Andrew’s farm
Nova and Allie’s farms



Close up of the cute art project.



A fun FARM wordsearch can be downloaded HERE at Proteacher.com.



Nova’s art and multiplication array…






did you notice who is sitting in the tractor? All the kids in my class!

  A Fun Math activity designing a garden for Frog and Toad for their 24 plants can be found HERE . It is a math “problem solving” that is challenging and fun. I will give the kids icons of plants to color and choose the amounts to use to make a “GARDEN ARRAY” and multiply the rows and columns.  The book is called Frog and Toad Together. The chapter is called The Garden. This will go great on the back of the farm art project. We’ll just call them “Farmer John Dear”. hehe. Then we will graph how many of each plant we planted in our garden. It was easy for my first graders.

MATH GRAPH

After we did our arrays last week we graphed our vegetable gardens this week!

Trace’s farm  4 x 3 = 12
Addie’s farm…the kids chose the veggies, and the amounts to make their arrays…
Vera’s Farm…… 3 x 4 = 12



Peter’s Farm… 3 x 3 = 9

Kate’s Farm and her math array… 2 x 4 = 8



For our writing workshop to go along with our farm and planting week, we are going to become farmers.  The cute writing paper I found is called “A Day on the Farm”. The kids’ assignment was:  Make up an animal character, his friends, the problem, and a solution. We divided our sloppy copy paper into 4ths and on one corner wrote the problem, on another corner the solution, another corner the 2 character names and who they are, and the 4th corner was the setting. Was it in the field? Or was it in the Barn? Or was it in the farmer’s house?
Then I modeled a story on the board about a farmer whose pig runs away. The kids all had their own ideas as we talked about possible farm problems.

Here’s Peter’s story…the rooster stopped crowing! Oh No!



Here’s Andrew’s story…the cow stopped giving milk! How Awful!



And Matt’s story is about the tractor hitting the barn! Bonk!



This tractor really did hit the barn!  (photos of us in cowboy hats) on the tractors!

Well, now that Spring has finally arrived in Utah, maybe I can actually get my own garden planted!
I better get on that real soon.  I’m kind of excited to grow some stuff after doing all this planting and
“farming” in my classroom. : D

Plants and Seeds and JACK AND THE BEANSTALK!

                                                    
Reader’s Theatre
We had a lot of fun this week doing a Reader’s Theatre of Jack and the Beanstalk to go along with our plant unit. I found some puppets for each of the 3 pages of text using these coloring book pages found at HERE at Sparkle Boxes.   Then we divide up the parts and have readers use their most expressive voices. This is the way I did it this year.

 Another way I’ve done it some years is to have each child bring in an empty cereal box. Then I cut out a square out of one side of the box after school (to use as a puppet theatre stage). Then we put the characters on Popsicle sticks upside down. Students paint black poster paint on their cereal boxes or cover them with paper (or spray paint them with a can of black paint after school). As the readers theater is read the kids can act out the parts on their own individual puppet theater stages on their desks. It’s a lot of fun. (but a lot of work too!) A picture and link to how to make a puppet theater out of a cereal box is HERE at Toddler Crafts. Or another cute one that shows how to do the puppet on a stick is HERE at Flipflops and Applesauce. I can’t find my sample or I’d snap a pic of it. Another cool tutorial is
this website HERE       

PUPPET FACES
 I blow up the characters large for a class puppet for some kids to act out the parts too. The link for character masks is HERE at Sparkle Box. You will need a color printer for the masks. I just put them on poster board and taped them to rulers to keep them sturdy. The kids LOVE doing these mini reader’s theatres. A link for a cute but long 4 page readers theatre is HERE from the Grandview Library.

There is also a crossword puzzle of Jack and the Beanstalk at this link from ABC teach.  It was a fun activity for my kids to do after reading the story and acting out the reader’s theater. My students loved this activity and didn’t even need the word bank. 

SCIENCE
 On Monday when we plant our seeds we will watch the time elapsed seeds growing into plants on one of the utube videos below. Then we are planting our seeds in recycled soup cans. You can use washed out soup cans from home, some washed out pint size milk cartons covered in paper, or make a terrarium out of liter or 2 liter bottles cut in half similar to the example picture below. I just use the spout for air hole and I cut out about 3 inches of the middle section of the bottle.

TERRARIUMS (using empty 2 liter bottles)

A really fun activity to teach seeds and plants is to make individual terrariums. A good step by step how to is found at this link to Teaching Tiny Tots HERE. I love how she used ivy. I’d like to use fast growing grass seeds or radish seeds so the students can see the roots and how they grow up into stems and then on the radish, leaves. Start by reading the book From Seed to Plant by Gail Gibbons. She is a master of children’s science books.
 2 Liter bottle terrarium instructions HERE

Another fun planting activity is doing “Sprout Houses” in a zip lock baggie. That’s what we are doing this year. I pass out Lima bean seeds that have been soaking overnight. Then I pass out wet cotton balls. A link to a fun lesson plan using Lima beans is HERE at A to Z Teacher Stuff. We use the Lima beans as our seeds for our sprout houses which are another kind of terrarium. Tape them up against a window for light. Watch what happens in a week!  I really like the kids to plant radishes because they come up within about 2 to 3 weeks.  I’ll post our sprout houses tomorrow.

Lima bean and cotton balls make up our Sprout Houses

Some of my girls making their Sprout Houses”

BOOKS

Flower Garden by Eve Bunting
Sunflower House by Eve Bunting
The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle
Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert

From Seed to Plant by Gail GibbonsFrog and Toad Together by Arnold LobelJock in the Beanstalk by Stephen Kellogg One of my favorite books that my own children loved was The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle. It goes through the plant cycle in a really fun way that kids will enjoy. ART PROJECTThen afterwards we make an art project using real sunflower seeds as the round middle part of a sunflower plant.  I’ve done it with yellow hands traced and cut out  around the circle of seeds, I’ve also used yellow paper petals, and I’ve used painted dots of yellow inside traced petals (pointillism) with Q tips dipped in yellow paint.  I will post pictures of all of my samples. Each year I tweak it a little bit.

WORD SCRAMBLEAnother fun link to a plant and seed word scramble of plants and seeds vocabulary is HERE at ABC Teach.  I would attach the word bank to the page so kids will have that to use which makes unscrambling a LOT easier! (My kids all told me it was “too easy” with the word bank. Oh well!                                   MUSIC  (use percussion instruments) A Seed Needs (To the tune of “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay” )           I see you are a seed,Tell me what DO you need?I need some soil to grow,And then the sun to glow,Water to make me wet,Air for my leaves to get,Space for my roots to spread,I’ll make your flower bed! by: Iram KhanI always look for a poem to put on the back of art to sing or read together for shared reading. This is a great one for the backs of our sunflower art projects or our veggie garden arrays. A fun MATH ACTIVITY designing a garden for Frog and Toad for their 24 plants can be found HERE . It is a math problem solving that is challenging and fun. I will give the kids a page of clip art plants to color with 4 of each plant and they will choose the number of plants to map out a garden “array”.  The book is called Frog and Toad Together  by Arnold Lobel. The chapter is called The Garden.  I turned it into a lesson on “arrays” and multiplication. They lined their garden veggies up and multiplied the “rows” times the “columns” of veggies. Here are a few finished ones.  Some did larger arrays and some just did 2 x 4. So it is a great lesson for differentiation with that open ended aspect to it. I also modeled one on the board and wrote in “column 1, column 2 and Row 1, Row 2 etc. So they could refer to mine. Everybody did it a little differently. 

Allie’s vegetable garden array…
Nova’s veggie garden array…
Kate’s veggie garden array…

Math: Attribute Seed SortAfter reading How a Seed Grows by Helene J. Jordan we will do a fun math activity. I buy a package of dried 7 bean soup mix (found in rice section of the grocery store). It is in a plastic bag. Give each table a Dixie cup full of  the bean mix. Then give each table a construction paper Venn diagram drawn on it in black marker. The task is to use the Venn to place the seeds into 2 groups depending on what attribute the students decide as pairs or a table. (bumpy, smooth, black, spotted, oval, round, white etc.) It really helps to first do a brainstorm of all the words to describe the many beans and list them on the board. Have table captains write the 2 attributes on 3 x 5 cards and place at the top of each circle of the Venn. If they can then find one with both attributes to go in the center section they get a gummy bear each.  Then have students walk around and see what other attributes the other tables decided on to give their Venn’s.  

7 bean soup and venn diagrams..I add a few seeds, large peanuts, pods from outdoors….a great activity!

                          

Hi Girls! They are sorting their beans and seeds…
Some wrote white and brown,  others seeds and nuts,  others big and little….
They added their own category titles on the yellow stickies…

We’ve also do a few worksheets and a journal entry about our “Sprout Houses” and how our lima beans are doing in the wet cotton balls. We sorted out the ways SEEDS TAVEL as partners using this file folder activity page I made up.  We read a few books on  HOW SEEDS TRAVEL too. (wind, water, nature, people, animals).                                    PLANT A RAINBOW!!! Veggies and flowers Another  thing we do in this unit is plant some flower seeds in a clear cup or else from a small milk carton or recycled can.  I have kids cover the can or milk cartons with cute scrapbook paper. A Fun plant tags can be found at this link HERE at Chart Jungle.  Names can go on tags too with sharpie marker. I’ve had good luck with beans and radish plants. I’m a black thumb usually, so I go with what has a quick germination. Radishes are 3 weeks!!! 😀

I will post pics of finished cute cans with our plants…

ART/SCIENCE MURAL So we end our unit by doing a mural. After reading Flower Garden by Eve Bunting, I give each child a small 5 x 5 piece of colored paper (flowers- use all colors), a long strip of green (stem), a 2 x 2 piece of black (seeds) and some green crepe paper 3 x 3 pieces (leaves), and a 4 x 4 piece of white (roots). I tell them they each have 4 jobs to do. They must take the papers and do a root, a leaf, a stem, a seed and a flower. (some years I delete the seed and pass out real seeds (pumpkin, sunflower, large ones that show up on the mural). Then I give them all about 5 or 6 minutes to cut out.

If you look close you can see a real seed or “bean” between the stem and root…

Then I start the mural as soon as a few are done.  I say,”If you have a cool looking root come on up!” If you have a cool looking stem, come on up!”and I have a glue bottle I put a few dots on each root, stem, etc. and we start to put the mural together. Kids glue down the parts of the plant on a  blue piece of butcher paper with brown glued along 5 inches of the bottom for dirt. .  Little by little the flowers will start out mixed up but will be finished as a flower collage. Nobody gets to put their whole flower together. And I don’t use all the kids flower parts. They put their root on some one’s seed, their flower on someones stem etc.  Then I have the fast finishers take black sharpies and label the 4 parts of the plants on about 5 of the flowers across the mural. Some kids make a sun, some clouds, etc.  It always looks fantastic.  I label it PLANTING A RAINBOW. Of course we have to read the story too! It is such a beautifully illustrated book on planting a flower garden.

Here is a sample center activity I have along with 2 similar matching activities  at the magnet center.

 PARTS OF A PLANT – MAGNET CENTER This idea was taken from a Red Butte Garden docent that came into my 2nd grade classroom and did this one year. I loved it and have used it ever since.  I  have the parts of a yellow sunflower plant I made up and laminated and put magnets on along with the labels that I place out at the magnet center. Kids love to put the flowers together and label them. The other center has pictures of parts of plants we eat and what type it is (root, leaf, flower/fruit, stem etc.)  I hope you enjoyed my plant and seed unit. I will post our “plants” very soon.  Happy Spring Planting!

                     

The Very Hungry Caterpillar & Eric Carle Author Study

We used oil pastels to decorate the green covers and do all the art inside…

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle is another of my favorite books. It is so clever and cute, and it’s a great addition to the insect unit we are about done with!!!

As a class we read The Very Hungry Caterpillar and students orally retell the story using  character cut-outs from DLTK’s website link HERE. Then we did a Butterfly Life Cycle earlier as part of the science rotation I did in our first grade team. So my class adds this writing project retell to our science unit on life cycles.  

Lots of the kids drew bright and colorful fruits for the caterpillar to munch on…
It’s so cute to see the holes punched in each page. I punch 1 hole for page 1 where he “eats through one item”….then I punch 2 holes for page 2….3 holes for page 3….4 holes for page 4 etc……
The end of the story has a chrysallis and then a pretty butterfly pops out! That dark green thing in the middle is the cocoon. I just freehand drew them, along with mini caterpillars to draw on each page and copied them off with the butterflies…

WRITING

 We do a fun and creative innovation on Carle’s book. I cut construction paper into 4 inch wide strips the long lengthwise way. Then  I staple them into pages with these lengths; 4,5,6, 7,8,9,10 inch lengths. Then punch 2 holes through 2nd page, 3 holes through 3rd page, etc. See my sample. The only real instructions they had after we brainstormed food items on the board, was to use 1 adjective or describing word on EVERY PAGE!  They are getting good at creative writing now!

 

Emma did these cute illustrations..5 holes on Friday, Double that on Saturday.
I punch holes in the pages 1 hole Monday up to 10 holes Saturday
The kids have to come up with a ton of stuff to have that poor caterpillar eat!

Then we rewrite the story doing our OWN version…. filling in food items we choose to write about. I bought the caterpillar and book at Kohls last year for $5.00. Actually I got the caterpillar for $2.50 because they were leftover on clearance! Gotta love a bargain! Hard to believe huh?  I love Eric Carle books! He’s a great one to do an author’s study on….kids love his books!

Author Eric Carle

Other fun books by Eric Carle are out so
kids can read them and we can add to ourknowledge base on insects…..And we cancompare and contrast them to spiders!

 

A cute butterfly coloring page is HERE at Twisty Noodle. We will attach the  poem below to the back of our Hungry Caterpillar books and read it together! The best part about the book is using Crayola oil pastels to do the pictures of all the foods the hungry caterpillar eats during the week.

 

POETRY or MUSIC (Sing to the tune of Itsy Bitsy Spider)

A little, green caterpillar crawling on a leaf,

Spun a little chrysalis, and fell fast asleep.

Then while she was sleeping, She dreamed that she could fly.

 And later when she woke up, she was a BUTTERFLY!

 

I have bugs, handheld viewers, cards to look at….
I bought a kids microscope on sale with strips of butterfly life cycle slides…kids LOVE to go to this center . 

 

MATH:

Graphing- What is your favorite bug? Butterflies? Honeybees? Grasshoppers? Dragonfly? Ladybugs? These were our top 5 we voted on. Guess which one was the winner?

The dragonflies were the winner on our Weekly graph….
We gave these Dollar Store bug holders out to a few kids to find “bugs” at recess….Joe brought in a centipede!

Here we are doing our +10, -10, +5, -2, Math Caterpillars

 

Estimation- Estimate how many Dollar Store bugs  are in the jar?I don’t have very many so everybody is really close on this one! I give a ring pop for 1st place. Everybody else gets a GUMMY WORM!

Estimation Jar….Nova won! 30 bugs!
We are making our caterpillar math projects….roll 2 dice…write number… Plus 10, minus 10, plus 5, minus 2…







SCIENCE

Watch a monarch butterfly come out of its chrysalis on video.

http://www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/monarch/ChrysalisEcloseClip1.html

 http://www/kidsbutterfly.org/  Do a life cycle of a butterfly. A link for a black line page of the 4 stages of a Butterfly can be found Here at Digital Pencil.org.  They have lots of games, a podcast and another video of a butterfly pupa stage. You can also buy the butterfly larva at Carolina Biological Supply for about $15.00. The link is Here for Carolina Biological Supply. I usually don’t send away for them until April anyway so now would be a great time to do it!

 

I have 2 big boxes full of insect material and about 15 books….

 

 P.E. “Bug Garden”.  Have students sit in chairs in a big circle. One student is in the middle without a chair. Give students names;1 ladybug, 2 dragonfly, 3 butterfly, 4 honeybee.  Then start over going around and around the circle till all are named. Then tell the caller to call out an insect name. (bees) All the bees must jump up and fly to another chair. Nobody who was a bee can stay in the same chair. The caller grabs one of the chairs and sits. The one who is leftover is the new caller. Then one fun part of the game is if the caller says “Fly Away Bugs!” then all the bugs get up and trade places. Last one to find a seat is the new caller!

 

More of my insect book collection…I like text “sets” of fiction with a non-fiction topic…

ART: Mosaic Butterflies– Children cut out butterfly pattern out of black paper. Cut out a few circles and ovals out of each side in symmetry. Then cut tissue paper squares to fit over the ovals and circles. Then  glue metallic mosaic tiles on the wings surrounding the circles. Put a ball headed clothes pin you have painted a bright color and pin in the middle and glue. Put black sharpie or wiggly eyes on and bright colored pipe cleaner antennae on top (wrapped around the ball head “neck” of the clothes pin.

                  

 Another idea is to use Karo syrup and food coloring and make designs on a card stock butterfly. They take about 3 days to dry but they turn out beautiful! Back them with colored paper or black for a real dramatic effect! A teacher friend of mine does a cute trick when painting butterfly colors on large, white butterfly cut outs. She has the kids blob paint in about 5 places on the butterfly. Then she folds the butterfly in half and they smooth over it. Open it back up and both sides have a symmetry of paint blobs. It looks really striking on her bulletin board too! 

More Math:
Caterpillar Shake Up!  – Use an egg carton. Put numbers 1 – 9 in each “egg holder”. Place 2 chips in the carton and close it and shake. Whatever 2 numbers chips landed in write them down as a 2 digit number. Then add + 10, take away -10, add +5 and take away -2. This will give you 4 math problems for each of the double digit numbers. example 21 would be 31,  11, 26,  19.  Then we glued down circles with the double digit numbers written on each circle. Then we glued all the circles together forming caterpillars. Put 2 eyes and antennae on the last one and some legs on each circle. Here’s a picture of our finished math caterpillars! 

Roll dice twice…use both numbers to make a 2 digit number
Then add 10, subtract 10, add 5 and subtract 2 to make 4 new numbers…
color them the same color as the caterpillar’s circle color….
We put the math on the back…caterpillars on the front…super cute bulletin board!

We then put the Caterpillar Shake Up egg carton at a center with new rules. Just shake it, write down the 2 digit number you choose (ex. if you roll a 3 and a 4 you could make 43 or 34) Then Have a partner do his shake and he puts down a double digit number he creates. Then you both  add the 2 numbers together to get the total. Then go again taking turns.

I hope we get some better weather soon so those caterpillars really WILL come around! But in the meantime we just put some ants into our blue gel antfarm. We will see if they make tunnels this week and we will post a picture when they do!  
 




Cinco de Mayo Fun!

Today we celebrated Cinco de Mayo. We ate tortilla chips and mango salsa. Then we played CINCO BINGO with numbers I called out.  (20 + 20 + 1 or 5 tens 3 ones or 1 quarter plus a dime) and kids had to figure out the numbers before they placed their bingo chip. They are getting good at this.

After about 3 games and 6 winners later, we read 2 Weekly Readers and read all the picture captions. Then we created a mariachi art project on a Mexican flag.   And sang a song to the tune of the ABCs.

We sing this song using percussion instruments!

 I had made up a spinner with Mexican words the kids might not know.  Then we read the book FIESTA (that is in an old literature series we still have in our closet at school_  It tells about how Mexican kids celebrate Cinco de Mayo in their community. After discussing some of the new vocabulary in the book we had kids come up and spin the vocabulary spinner. Then they had to use the word in a sentence. Everybody was great at it.

We did our vocabulary test this week using some of the Spanish Words we learned.

Then we passed out Mexican sombreros for art and some Oriental Trading stickers on the Mexican theme. They colored, cut out and decorated their sombreros.  We counted up to 10 three times in Spanish. Then I’d ask the kids “What is ocho, what is tres?” They loved it!

Here we are just before our 1st Grade Musical called “Seasons Change”
Boy did they do a fantastic job dancing the Maypole Spring dance!!!

While they were working I read them The Tortilla Factory. They loved eating their plates of tortilla chips and salsa with mango and peach. Mmmmmm….. Some years I buy a pinata or we make little ones out of brown paper bags and tissue paper with a donkey head. I usually fill the pinatas with colorful taffy. A cute book on pinatas is Curious George Pinata Party by H.A. Rey. It also has the spanish right along with the English words.

Everybody picked out 7 stickers to put on their hats.

We did the hats in red, green and yellow
The Mexican Hat Dance is one of the cute songs on the Dance CD

Lastly, we have to do the Mexican Hat Dance. I have a Dance Party CD that I use all the time for many holidays. It was a great purchase! And we make speech bubbles with “talking marks” of what the Mariachis were saying to one another and put them and our hats up on the bulletin board. We call the quotation marks 66 and 99 (the number words) in my class. Kids love to celebrate Cinco de Mayo.  Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone!

To the Picasso of Mothers! Happy Mother’s Day!

 
                           Picasso’s Version

I love this art project.  Look up the website Mrsbrownart.com at this link HERE. Scroll down to first grade art projects. Look for this Picasso re-creation.  I have a story to go along with it.

 When Daniel, my youngest boy went to a gifted 1st grade class in  California, his gifted teacher Mrs. Seaton did this project for a Mother’s Day card.  I treasure this card so much. I love the handwritten message to me. It means even more because we lost this child when he was in a car accident 5 years ago.

 I never knew which of the masters this particular teacher had used as a model but I remember hearing that they had used a famous painter as inspiration. I loved the card so much.

I told that story to a parent helper one day 4 years ago just before Mother’s Day. We were just cutting out hand tracings for the Mother’s Day card..  She went out and bought the print of Picasso’s work that week, and the class parents presented it to me with a lovely note, a teacher bag with all the kids’ “finger” prints on it made into insects (I’m a science nut teacher and they all knew it) and a  gift certificate to my favorite store, Kohls.

Now, the Picasso copycat art…. it isn’t just a beautiful card that I got once from a very sweet little first grade son of mine; it is also a labor of love from parents who showed they cared about me, the teacher. I loved that gift from the heart and I treasure it.  And every year as we do our Mother’s Day cards I think of my little first grade Danny Moss. And I think of the parents and kids of my class of 2018 and I smile. You’ll be in my heart forever guys…  Happy Mother’s Day to all the fantastic moms out there! Enjoy your special day!

Mother’s Day Ideas

MOTHER’S DAY GIFT IDEAS….

  1. Every year it seems like I reinvent the wheel and come up with another kind of mom’s day gift. I love having the kids write a card. I have them put their handprint on the front in some cute way. Then they write a really nice letter inside telling their mom things like; I think you cook ______ really good.  My favorite thing you do with me is ________. Things like that with specifics. I loved learning that one of my boys loved me to make Taco Salad. I never knew till I got his first grade card!

Then we make some sort of gift. Here are some I’ve done in the past. 

  1. Make a recipe book with recipes from the students and a real recipe from the moms on the back. Copy them into a class book. Put a picture on the front of each and decorate with scrapbook paper.
  2. Make a silouette with each child’s black silouette on the front and a letter/card on the back.
  3. Get some rinsed out baby food jars or small sauce jars from the kids. Use a solution of half water half glue. Paint on 2 inch squares of pastel tissue paper. You can also use modge podge. Fill each glass jar with a voltive candle. Wrap with tissue paper and ribbons when dry. 
  4.  Get Dollar Store whisks and fill with any type of wrapped candies. Wrap up with celophane and ribbons. Add a note “Whisking you a Happy Mother’s Day!”

    5.                                       

  5. 2. Have kids bring in some short, fat cans like pinapple or fruit cans or could even be soup cans. Cover with pastel scrrapbook paper. Line the top with a coordinating ribbon. Cover inexpensive Bic pens with floral green tape and add a flower to the eraser area. Put the finished “flowers in your “pot” by adding rice or dried beans. Voila! A cute pot with flowers. 
  6. Pot some soil in a small ceramic or clay pot. Have students paint hearts and kisses and flowers on with acrylic paint. Tie a ribbon around the rim. Add alphalpha or grass seeds to the dirt. Let it grow for a week or so. When it is high send it home with a cute scrapbook paper note that says “I love you with every hair on my head!”.
  7. Make bath salts out of Epsom salts and scented oils. Wrap in celophane with cute ribbons. Attach a poem;  Roses are red, violets are blue, here’s some bath salts I made just for you! Stamp a KISS on the bottom of each card with red ink.  
  8. Hand Prints out of clay glazed and fired. I’ve actually never done this yet. It would be a lot of work.

It will have to be a surprise which one we are doing THIS year! hehehe…..

Free happy Mother's day Themed printable stationary(stationery) and happy Mother's day border paper for school teachers and students

Bath Salts Recipe-
3 cups Epsom salts
1 tablespoon glycerin
perfume (or lotion)
two drops of food coloring
 Combine glycerin and food coloring. Add perfume to make a fragrant mixture. Then add to Epsom salts. Stir thoroughly. When it’s dry wrap in celophane and pink ribbons.

Some of my favorite books about a mom’s love for her kids.

Here is how to make a box for your mother’s day presents.You can make another one that will fit over this one and make a little “box” to put a cute treasure inside. One year I got kits to make up beaded bracelets from Oriental Trading. It was surprising how well the kids did on beading. It was easy for them. Then we put them inside a cute box made from hot pink paper and put some heart stickers on the top.  You could use scrapbook paper or neon papers.


I’ll post the ones we decide to do this year.   Happy Mother’s Day!
                    

Royal Wedding Wishes!

Since the news people have all been calling it the Wedding of the Century I thought that we would mark the day in our classroom today.  So I had the kids write letters to Prince Will and Princess Kate congratulating them on their BIG DAY!

They each said what they would give them for a present if they could send a gift across the pond. We did “sloppy copies”, then I edited them, then we did brightly colored final copies. We had everything from a Lear Jet to a giant anaconda. My favorite was “a big yellow ball like those that hamsters run around in” only it could be for Will and Kate to run around in. Super cute. I made copies of the letters and told all the kids I’d mail them to Buckingham Palace. Maybe we’ll get a note back!

Then we made some Royal Crowns. A link for a tutorial on Medieval Crown is HERE at firstpalette. We just HAD to mark the occasion somehow. They will look back in their writing portfolios sometime when they are older, and remember the Wedding of the Century and how they kinda took part.  : D

What Did YOU do for Spring Break?

This past week was my Spring Break from school. We are so lucky as teachers, to have this week off to veg out, get rejuvenated and play with our families and get some good reading in.

Josie and Grandma at Easter time….

Marisa turned 4 on the 20th so we went up to Discovery Children’s Museum at Gateway Mall. It was fun to follow the girls all around taking pics of them playing in the construction zone, the supermarket and the water and magnet centers. They even climbed up into the helicopter. So cute! We saw a lot of my students present and former there too. It’s a great day for a day off!



In the construction zone… they loved shoving fake bricks down the slide…





Megan engrossed in the playhouse furniture…



Marisa and Tiff in building blocks…





What’s more fun than splashing in the water wheels?



Marisa loved the post office….
Megan loved the little cars…
And the magnetic gear wall…



I’m making a yummy concoction guys….wanna sip of it? mmm nope.



Look what I can do!

 I got to read a lot too. I am working my way through the Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” and also Cristine Northrop’s book on The Wisdom of Menopause. Don’t laugh. It could happen to YOU too! It’s a great book recommended to me by my friend and college roommate. Yeah. now we are both old. It sucks.

Johnny and I on Easter….

So John and I heard it was FREE week for all the National Parks. And I had told him months ago we should go back and see Old Faithful the geyser at Yellowstone. It’s probably been 30 years since I’ve seen it…(I went there with an old boyfriend hehe). So we decided to go up to our cabin at Bear Lake and stay the night and then get up (after making John’s famous waffles) and drive to Jackson Hole.

We had to stop and snap this gorgeous scene on the way to Yellowstone last week….
We saw water fowl…and beautiful scenery…

It is a fun touristy place with lots of beautiful (and very expensive) shops and museums. I guess a lot of celebrities have places near Yellowstone. John kept telling me Harrison Ford has a place nearby. (I’d like to go see Harrison….yeah…love him….didn’t he marry Ally McBeal?)  Anyway, we had lunch there at the Great Harvest Bread Company. We live high off the hog you know.  Then we took some fun pictures around town. They have lots of artsy sculptural designs in bronze. I’d love a bronze in my front yard…yeah…in another life. Those things are thousands of dollars!

Jackson Hole had neat bronze statues…
Don’t ya love it…Bruce just does his own thing…when we’re trying to take pictures!
Antler arches….some nice tourists took our picture for us!

I felt very confident in going to Yellowstone because I had made maps and gone on the Internet to be sure the gates were open and stuff like that.  I handed all that stuff over to my navigator husband….who left them on his desk at home. Um hum…..I shoulda left them in my purse.

Yummy lunch at Great Harvest….



Mark Twain is behind me….

 I distinctly recall seeing that the gates open on April 15th when I checked Yellowstone’s website. So why didn’t they tell us ONLY the west entrance was open. We drove to the South entrance of course. And all these cars were turning around in front of us. What the heck?


We saw a couple of Moose!



Johnny was so much fun to be with….he makes me laugh….
I shot a rainbow as it started sprinkling…you can barely see it tho….
Pretty lake in Teton forest just outside of Yellowstone Park….

Well, we decided to go take some pretty pictures around the Teton forest and around this lake, I can’t remember what it is called. We saw 2 moose, some water fowl, and a few rainbows as it started to lightly rain. We listened to that new country/crossover brother-sister band called The Band Perry. I decided that I LOVE all their music! We are going to go get tickets this Friday when tickets go on sale for Tim McGraw because they are his lead in band. And they are coming to the new West Jordan concert place. We had a great time hanging out together with Brucie our doggie.

Bruce is bored…but he doesn’t want to miss a thing we are talking about….he leaned on my headrest most of the ride!
It was a really fun day hanging out with my 2 men. I LOVE time off. It makes life worth LIVIN!  Mmmhmmm…. Happy Spring!