Last Week

April has just FLOWN BY!! I cannot believe May is only 2 days away. This is that time of year where I'm digging, digging, digging to find fun activities to keep my kiddos engaged (and let's face it, keep myself engaged, too).  So here are some things we have been up to..

PLANTS. I bought the Teacher Wife's Plant Activities packet:

My favorite thing from this packet was the Plant Journal. We put lima beans into ziploc bags with a damp paper towel and watched them grow all week long. Each day they drew a picture and made an observation. We stuck the ziploc bags to their lockers as you can see below:

CONTEXT CLUES. I began the week by writing a story with made-up words. I wrote one line at a time, and had my kids guess what I was doing. (After the first sentence I asked them about all the places I could be. Then I added that it was fun, so we started to narrow it down to places that were fun.) In almost every sentence I created a word that didn't exist (they had to read around the word to figure out what the word meant.) They had a lot of fun with this, and laughed A LOT at the silly words. In the example below, I was at Chuckie Cheese. They were able to figure it out by the last line, and then we went back through the story to figure out what the mystery words were. 

After that, they created their own stories with words that didn't exist. I had them share with their groups, then they picked one person from their table to share with the entire class. It was a lot of fun, and I was really surprised at how well they did. The next few days we used context clue cards, practice tests, and cloze activities to continue our work. 

We are wrapping up our measurement unit in math. My kids have had a lot of fun measuring different things around the room, and we are moving on to capacity this week. So that's what we have been up to in my room. I hope you can find some of these tips helpful, and I hope you have a great week!