Easter Egg Hunt

I hear Easter Egg Hunt, and immediately think, "I need to make cute baskets for their eggs!"  Baskets turned out to be impractical (duh, right?) but a parent generously gave us these great little white boxes.  So of course, I had to come up with a way to decorate them to the nines, and came up with this!

It was so easy!  I started by giving each kid some Easter egg designs to color and cut out. 

Step 2: Cut strips of green paper for the grass, and cut "fringe" along one side. 

Step 3: Glue the paper eggs to the sides of the boxes first, then glue the grass down over them.  (I told my kids it was okay for the eggs to be half covered, because when they hunt for their eggs in the grass later, half of those eggs will be buried in the grass, too!

Let everything dry, and voila!  Beautifully decorated Easter boxes!

Me versus the Paper Monster

Can I just tell you, I hate grading papers. It is a deplorable chore that I put off and put off, until finally I'm in a situation like this:

Now, I'm preetttttty organized in regards to school supplies, books, and my filing cabinet.  But when it comes to my students' finished work, I'm a mess.  (See above.)  So every couple weeks, I have to spend (what feels like) an eternity going through the piles of paper, grading and filing, until the same table looks like this:

As you can see, I needed a Starbucks break somewhere in there, but I all but finished!  Whew! 

One of my projects this summer will be to come up with a system for taming the paper monster. I'm open for suggestions, people!  How do you stay on top of grading, and keep the deluge of paper at bay?

Math Center Dice Games

I bought a tub of 72 double-dice (a die within a die) at Lakeshore last summer, and I've found that there are there are sooo many ways to use these little guys.  At the beginning of the year, I used them to help my students with addition fluency.  Students had to add the number of pips on each die to get the total sum of pips, writing the equations in their math journals.  (Yep, the little dots on dice are called pips.)  My kids were amazed when I told them they weren't just called "dots," and even more amazed that I knew about this.  All the things I teach them every day, and this is the piece of knowledge that makes them think I'm a genius who knows everything.  Go figure. 

Lion Drawings

Here is the latest bit of art that I did with my students. I try to do an art project of some kind every Friday, and this was the most recent "Artwork Friday Masterpiece."  A lion is surprisingly easy to make, by drawing two hearts:  one heart, then another upside down heart, with opposite points touching. Add some eyes, ears, a triangle nose, and a flowing mane all around, and you pretty much have yourself a lion!

                

Favorite iPad Apps: Bluster

Another one of my favorite iPad apps, Bluster!  This app is FREE, and it has three different levels of difficulty, which is fantastic because I have a huge range of ability in my class this year.  But word to the wise: turn the volume down, because otherwise you will have the computerized sound of thundering clouds and rain roaring through your classroom.  

California Science & Social Studies Units

I discovered these free science and social studies units last year, and they are great.  Published by the California Education and the Environment Initiative, each unit is centered within the context of the environment. They're aligned to the California State Standards for science and social studies, so you could use these instead of your textbook series at different points in the year for many of the standards. (I don't know about you, but I am not in love with my science textbook or my social studies textbook.)  And, the best part is that they've recently released Common Core Correlation Guides for each unit, making it totally easy to include the Common Core standards in your lesson plans.

The website to download these units is www.californiaeei.org

The website will ask you to register your email, etc. to get the password for downloading everything (at least you needed to do this last year), but the password is teacheei if you don't want to go through all that. 

Writing About Bats

This was a bulletin board I did in October, when we read informational text about bats and then wrote sentences about them.

(I wanted these bats to be happy, fun bats, however some of my boys simply had to draw bloody fangs on their bats.  What can you do?)

Irregular Plural Nouns

We've been doing some review work on irregular plural nouns. When I covered this earlier, a few of my kids were still a liittttlle shaky on the whole concept of nouns (compared to verbs and adjectives), so I decided to touch on it again. This is a writing activity we did last month in our writing journals:

This was enough for the majority of the class to "get it," especially after writing sentences that used irregular plural nouns.  But to let my stragglers catch up to the pack, I did this activity:

I had a list of 28 nouns one for each student, with several nouns for each of the following singular-to-plural rules: 

~add -s, 

~add -es, 

~change y to i and add -es, 

~change f to v and add -es, and 

~keep the plural noun the same as the singular. 

I then drew name sticks to assign students to a word, and they had to draw and label the singular noun on one side of the page, and draw and label the plural noun on the other half of the page, using the appropriate rule.  

The best part of this activity came the following morning during reading centers, when the kids had to sort each other's labeled drawings according to the rule they used to make the noun plural.  They recognized each other's work, and loved using their own work to do the sort. I guess there are situations where my beautifully crafted and laminated flash cards aren't the best way for kids to learn!  (While my ego took a slight blow, I realized that it's a lot less work for me if the kids make their own sorting cards for grammar and spelling conventions.)

To really drive the concept of irregular plural nouns home, I assigned this app in one of my iPad centers. In this free app, the kids are given a sentence that uses an irregular plural noun, except they have to decide what form of the noun should be used. For example, "The boy saw three ______ in the forest."  Then the students have to drag either the word deer or the word deers into the blank.