Earth Day

April 22, one of my favorite days each year.  I love celebrating Earth Day with my students and teaching them about the 3 R's.  Last year I did the "litterbug" art project inspired by First Grader at Last.  Alas, I was not an obsessive blogger/TPTer last year did not get any pictures of my litterbug museum, so here is her version.  Cute, right?

  

 

This year I will be doing this wonderful "I Love My Earth" flip poem by First Class Teacher.  I love flip books and they turn out very well.  Not to mention it ties in with landforms and we never have enough time to teach science and social studies love those cross-curricular connections!  Click the pic to download this freebie!

I also wanted to create an Earth Day math activity to go in my math tubs this week, so I quickly made a Making 10's Freebie.  Students will be doing this in math tubs with a partner.  Visit my TPT store to download!

Thanks for reading and please consider following our blog, TPT store and/or facebook page!

Spring Chicks!

I know the calendar says April but here in northern Michigan we're enjoying the only benefit of an OMG I CAN'T BELIEVE IT'S STILL SNOWING LET'S MOVE TO FLORIDA STOP SNOWING ALREADY STORM early spring snow/ice storm - a Snow Day!  But the winter weather hasn't stopped me from getting excited to embark on a sad lesson in the circle of life successful spring chick hatching in my classroom!  My friend Patti, who raises more animals than you can imagine with her daughters for 4H, just stopped by with her egg incubator and the fertilized eggs have been delivered to school so I should be all set.  But then I remembered our failure to hatch any live chicks from our eggs last year and thought I'd better get more prepared.

Hatching Chicks Survival Guide

I wanted an easy way to keep track of how many times I turned my eggs and the temperature guidelines for my incubator so I thought I'd make a simple chart I could post in my room.  But one thing led to another, and two hours later I had my Hatching Chicks Mini-Unit! I will definitely be using these posters and printables during the next few weeks, and maybe you can use them too!

Mini-Unit Includes:

• incubator recording poster (color and b & w)
• chicken life cycle poster
• chicken life cycle writing prompts with lines and without (color and b & w)
• A Hen Lays An Egg original song
• 6 page student booklet to read and color
• egg hatching paper chain countdown links with daily chick/embryo stage of development

Thanks for reading and please consider following our blog, TPT store and/or facebook page!

Spring is Here - April Fool's!

It's snowing here on April 1st!  I guess spring is never coming taking it's own sweet time...I suppose that's what we get after a long winter with 10, yes 10 snow days!  Anyhow, it's spring break for me and since it's not very spring-like outside I thought I'd try to bring some spring inside with this fun "Hop into Spring" Making 10's freebie for you!  This is a great Common Core State Standards based activity to help students learn combinations of ten!

 How We Did It

We actually used this spring Making 10's game in my class the week before spring break in math choices (More about how math choices in an upcoming post) and it went great!  Here's how I organized the activity:

I printed out all 4 game boards along with the 4 Easter themed game boards (part of  Making 10's throughout the Year) and I put one of each inside a plastic page protector.  

 

Students used dry erase markers to find combinations of 10 by circling adjacent numbers.  Since I had a parent volunteer helper that day I asked students to play the game as a 1-player game while the parent helped, and now that they know the game it will go into the games rotation as a 2-player game.  The kids enjoyed the activity and little did they know, they got to practice many of the first grade Common Core State Standards including: CCSS 1.OA.B.3 (Properties of Addition), CCSS 1.OA.C.6 (Fluency of Facts within 10), and CCSS 1.OA.D.8 (Unknown Numbers).

 

A fun alternate version of game play to increase fact fluency would be to give each child in your class or group a game board, set a timer and see how many combinations they can find within a set amount of time. 

And Now for the Freebie!

Click here to go to the download, available on TPT

I  hope you get a chance to use this spring freebie with your class or maybe just looking at  the cute spring flowers will brighten up your day.  Thanks for reading and please consider following our blog and/or facebook page!