Easter Fun

I said I would post pictures!!!  :o)  They had so much fun picking out their eggs and graphing the "surprise" jelly beans.  I have to say though......the best part was eating them.  If you missed the Easter Egg Surprise graph freebie I had up last week, click here.

Easter Egg Surprise Freebie

We also read the book The Easter Bunny is Missing.  I had the kids make predictions about where they thought the Easter bunny had gone, and you know what, they were correct.....vacation!  In the story some of the other forest animals try to be the Easter bunny because they think they will be the best.  It turns out that no one can do it.  Good thing the Easter Bunny comes back.

After reading the story, I had them think about why they would make a good Easter Bunny.  We worked on our opinion sentence writing!  :o)  I love it......one little girl said she would make the best Easter Bunny because she........."is good at hiding things."  

I hope your students enjoyed their Easter activities too!

"Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life.  He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die." John 11:25-26

Seusstastic Day!

Today our school celebrated Dr. Seuss's birthday!  We did several different Seuss activities and ended the day with a school wide celebration.

One of our first activities was with the book, Cat in the Hat.   After reading the book, I had the kids brain storm all the words that rhyme with cat.  The kids picked which words they wrote on their rhyming hat from the list we made as a class.  They loved this book, and were very excited to make Cat and his famous hat.

I got our next craft activity from a blogger friend, Mary from Mrs. Lirette's Learning Detectives.   I showed the kids the craft first and made them guess which book we were going to be reading.  They did it!  :o)  One little boy nailed it ....."That is Horton and Whoville!"  Yes, we read Horton Hears a Who.

Our last activity for the day was our annual school wide celebration - Seuss Readers Theater!  A Dr. Seuss story is presented by the outstanding and ever popular teachers at Marshall Elementary.  This year we preformed Hooray for Diffendoofer Day!  Seuss died before he finished this book, but with the help of Prelutsky and Smith the book was published in 1998.  Our big kids are starting state assessments next week, so the book was a great way to get them excited.

I hope your day was as fun as ours!

"This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it." Psalm 118:24

If I Built a Car

We use Animated Literacy at our school, so when we can finally read "car" the kids look sooooo forward to computer lab time.  We read a book called If I Built a Car by Chris Van Dusen.

This is a story about a little boy who designs his own car, and let me tell you it is a hum-dinger of a car!  lol :0)  There is fun little game on ABCya.com that lets kids design their own car too.  They love it!  The kids can give their car a name and then print their design.  They are so proud that they designed it and got to pick what went were.  (And I mean....what went where!  Some of the cars had stuff all over!)  Here are some of the designs from my classroom.  Who knows, one of these kids could be designing your car in the future!!  hahaha

Dust Bunnies

The second week of school we read Rhyming Dust Bunnies when we began our rhyming unit.  Great book and the kids really enjoyed it, especially Bob!

BUT, then over the next couple of weeks, like always, the tattling, unkind words, name calling, and so on picked up (the new to Kindergarten, scared to death, shy kiddos left, and my room was replaced with "Yep, I got this kiddos!").  lol  So, I found a new book in our library that had our favorite Dust Bunnies in it.  It was called Here Comes the Big, Mean Dust Bunny.

This was great for Character Ed.  We talked about how we treat our friends and about how we feel when someone is "mean" to us.  This led into some great modeling and practice.  We practiced how to respond to someone when they were being mean to us or to one of our friends.  The kids had a great time, and I truly believe that we need to give them/teach them the words to use so when the time comes, they know what to say.  You know it was in our best Kindergarten voice, “Oh no, I don’t think what you are doing is very nice!”  "I don't think you should treat your friends like that."  You know what, later that day I actually heard a student say it.  WOW, they do listen.  There are some very adorable Dust Bunny crafts out there on the internet, but my favorite came from Miss Alison.  Thanks Alison.

http://missalisonisblogging.blogspot.com/p/how-to-make-rhyming-dust-bunny.html

Great Book! ARGUS

I taught the letter D today, and I usually read How Droofus the Dragon Lost His Head, but it was gone from the library.  :0  Oh NO!!!  Someone else must have wanted a good read, so I had to find a new book.  Thank you to our wonderful librarian, she had a new book.....ARGUS.  What a fun read!!  The teacher hands out eggs for the class science project.  BUT,  Sally's egg is a little different.  I am already thinking of so many great things to do with this book.  We are starting our Living and Non-Living unit, talking about how things grow and change.....wow, look at all the possibilities!!!