Our work in Pictures.

Day 2 of spring break. I am sticking to my plan of a little bit of work and a lot of relaxation each day. The weather has been gorgeous too! 

Yesterday I shared 3 of my favorite video snippets of my students hard at work. Today I'd like to share all the wonderful creations my students have been working on this month. 

Valentine crafts. 

Presidential Learning.

The R-controlled triplets: er, ir, & ur.

Read Across America

Hard at work during small group/ guided reading time. 

That's all for today folks. Come back tomorrow for a peek at our classroom centers & workstations. 

Peek at my 4 day week: 02/17/14

I'm back! Did ya miss me? :P

This week, my students had Monday off, so only 4 days of learning. While I love 4 days weeks, it gets tough to cram everything in, especially when you have multiple 4 day weeks in a row. Yikes.

Kinder
This week my Kinder's will start learning about animals. We will start with a Wild Animal theme. Of course we will still have our letter of the week, Uu and 2 HFW, for and have.

Books we will read include...

Online Resources:
We will use Pebble Go's animal section to look at some wild animals and talk about their "wild" characteristics.

First Grade
First grade will be ALL ABOUT President's day. Well President's day, and R-controlled vowel ar, like a Pirate!

Books we will read include...

Online Resources:
I will use PebbleGo again, but this time I will use the biography section to study President Washington, Lincoln and Obama.

We will also use BrainPop Jr. They have several videos, presidents, Washington, and Lincoln that I think will be helpful in helping my students access the content more easily.

Thematic resources we will pillage through and use are...

In addition to these adorable resources you can also find the links to the resources we will use for our Phonics lessons in the download of my lesson plans. Just click on the images of my plans above.

Feels like a PACKED week. Can't wait to get our learn on tomorrow.
Happy Planning!

Don't forget to check on the button below and check out the other fab plans that are linked up too.

Presidents day

We weren't in school for Presidents day. Well, I should say the kids weren't in school, it was a plan day for me. The previous Friday and following Tuesday I had some ELL testing and didn't see my students either. I went almost a whole week without seeing. When I was done I had a 3 day week, so I took that time to really go over Presidents day and work on those very cute activities I have found on other blogs. 

I can't say I created anything original. We did activities very similar to last years, just tweaked a bit.

Wednesday was all about Washington, Tuesday was all about Lincoln, and Friday we compare the two, talked about the presidency, and who is our current president.

The Kindergartners made those cute Washington and Lincolns.

School A

 

School B

 A close up of George...

and Lincoln.

 Of course I had to add our current President. I was not surprised, but pleased to know that most of my students, knew who he is and could tell me his name. It may not sound like a big deal, but when you just came to this country and can't even really ask a question, or share a story it is a big deal.

 We then proceeded to complete a Venn-Diagram comparing the two.

I printed a large one and completed it with my students, as a model. That is the one I displayed. I used my Doc Cam and projector so my students could see and they completed one of their own at their desks that they get to take home. I got this Venn-Diagram from Sarah Paul's Freebie President Unit.

The Washington and Lincoln templates I got from Mrs. Larremore's blog Chalk Talk.

I wanted something a bit more for my First grade students.

I had the students color, cut and paste the president from these template I found on Pintrest. Then I used the facts from Mrs. Thiessen's compare and contrast activity. I can't fr the life of me find the Lincoln and Washington templates. If you know where to find them please leave me a comment so I may share the source.

School A

School B

We read...

to talk about each president. We read the Washington page when we learned about GW and the Lincoln page when we learned about AL, and the Obama page when we learned about BO. Here are a few screen shots.

 

 I love the illustrations. It does have ALL the presidents, I just did not want to overwhelm my students.
 

On Friday we read...

and talked about what a President does.

Then we completed this "If I were President I would..." sheet.

 "stop the state of fighting people."

 "help people to clean up."

 "help the people with stuff."

 "go to the white house and work." This one made me crack up.

"I would free the slaves." This one made me think he was thinking about the Civil war, because we did talk about it a bit when we were learning about Lincoln. However, after going home and reflecting on it, I wondered if he was making a connection with his home country, where they are in fact still a great deal of oppression, slavery and war. It made me sad and glad that he is now here in the US.

One of the other resources I used were some Brain Pop videos.
George Washington
Abraham Lincoln
What the President does.

The kids really seems to get it so much better with the videos and they were able to tell me so much more than I thought they would. I was pleasantly surprised.

This week is all about Seuss, and I am as crazy as the Cat in the Hat himself! :P I have a formal observation tomorrow so wish me luck.