Butterfly Release

We successfully hatched about 30 butterflies in the Spring! The entire kindergarten released their butterflies one morning.  In my earlier post, I talked about our school's outdoor learning center.  This butterfly garden is separate from the sensory garden.  It's just as awesome!

Year in Review...Our Outdoor Learning Center!

Our school has an outdoor learning center!  It's fabulous!  There are several gardens...vegetable, sensory, butterfly and ABC.  These photos are from our lesson in the sensory garden.  There are five sections to the sensory garden.  One section for each of the five senses.  Volunteers from our local garden club maintain the gardens and schedule the visits.  Our class hatched butterflies and released them in the garden.  I'll post those photos, soon.  The vegetable garden is maintained by the upper grades and the ABC garden has a plant for every letter of the alphabet.  The kids LOVE it! 

An Oldie!

Just wanted to share an oldie but a goodie from at least 10 years ago!  I know I will be doing this activity the first day of school in August.  This is originally Deanna Jump's idea.  And I still love it!

The Houston Astros Visit!!

I LOVE baseball!  We were sooo lucky to have three Astros and their mascot, Orbit, visit our school.  The Astros talked about the importance of setting goals and working every day to achieve them.  After a few questions from the students, they had a toilet paper roll race.  A student from my class was chosen.  She's usually very shy, but was a really great sport.  A few weeks later, her mom told me that they were moving to north Texas...I guess she'll have to be a Ranger fan now!

Draw, Flip, Read

I'm just doing a little summer drawing...my kids (and parents) love any directed drawing activities we do!  Each drawing is always unique.  I combined my directed drawing lessons with a flip book and an independent writing sheet and posted it to TPT. “Draw, Flip, Read” is a series of theme related directed drawings

with flip books and an independent writing page, for each drawing.  Step by step written instructions and step by step illustrations are included for each drawing.  Great for vocabulary and geometry terms such as:  above, below, before, after, right, left, adjacent, rectangle, right angle, etc. The themes included in this set are:  Brown Bear, Colorful Cat, Coconut Tree, Big Red Barn and Johnny Appleseed.  This set is great for August/September themes such as, Back to School, Colors, Farm, Names and Apples.  Sight words in this unit are: on, a we, can, where, is, the, has, here, comes, up, are, see, the, I, brown, red, yellow, blue, green, purple, white, black, orange.  Look for more “Draw, Flip, Read” products on TPT. Click here to check it out for $5.  A free download, “Fairy Tale” version is available on TPT.

"Draw, Flip, Read" Freebie for the Fourth!

Our fairy tale unit is one of my favorites!  Earlier, I blogged about our castle trip.  After the trip, we did a directed drawing.  My kids (and I) love directed drawing.  It's great for building listening skills and vocabulary. We do one drawing with every unit. My students also complete the flipbook and independent writing sheet that is included.  I posted a free fairy tale "Draw, Flip, Read" to TPT. Click here for your free download.  Happy Fourth!!

My year in reverse continues...100th day.

Making the 100th day hats.

Collecting 100 numbers.

Putting 100 numbers on the chart.

Making 100th day ice cream cones.

Our 100th day snack.

I continuing my year in reverse!  I love to look back at all the fun things we did.  These photos are from the month of February...our 100th day celebration.  I have made these 100th day hats for years.  We have some wonderful volunteers that cut the construction paper strips then, glue 10 construction paper strips to a sentence strip.  The kids use dot markers and put 10 dots on each construction paper strip. Next, we had a number hunt.  In the past, I have put the paper number in a balloon.  The kids would crawl on their knees and sit on the balloon to pop it and get the number that was inside.  However, this year I had air compressor issues...so I scattered the numbers throughout my room. I assigned the numbers to hunt.  For example, numbers that have a 2 in the tens place.  Or, numbers that have the same number in the ones and tens place (like 55).  Then, we place all the numbers on a chart (no photo).  Our paper ice cream cones were from fabulous Cara Carroll, I think.  The kids chose 10 scoops and glued them on top of their cones.  Then, they wrote by tens on each scoop.  Finally, of course, we have to eat!  They counted out ten of each of the ten different items and put them in their baggie.  This activity has been done a zillion times, but the kids still love it!