Learning In Wonderland

This part of the year has flown by!  I feel like I barely got to know my class and they are leaving soon.

We have been having a blast this month.  First with Easter and now moving onto oviparous animals.  I'm trying to teach frog life cycles, reptiles, birds and anything else I can squeeze in right now without confusing them.

I spent a couple of days last week on frog life cycles and quickly moved on to turtles and guess what?? Some of their writings said that "first a turtle hatches out of an egg, then it grows two legs and then two more legs and it's tail disappears" :( Oh no!! Note to self: don't teach frogs and turtles in the same morning or this is what happens.

So after we clarified the difference between frog and turtle life cycles we read a Scholastic magazine about turtles.  This issue was for the month of March but I wanted to wait to use it when teaching oviparous animals.  The issue was pretty good!  Kids loved it and it's easy to read.  Great vocabulary and photos too. We then did a craftivity created by Amy Lemons.  You can get the copies here and she even included the writing paper for this one.  She is awesome!

Here are some pictures of some of the activities my kids did.

I found this linky party all about pets!! Woohoo! I love my pug dearly so it's awesome to share my little friend.



If you want to join in the fun hop on over to Soaring Through Second Grade and link up your beloved pet!

We studied dinosaurs a couple of weeks ago and I used Deanna Jump's Dinosaur Unit.  If you don't own this, go and get it right now! It's so good!  I love that her units include notes about how she goes about teaching these subjects.  I have been teaching Dinosaurs for five years now and couldn't believe some of the stuff that my kids were missing out on.

The cutest project ever was the paleontologist project! It was adorable! I had the kids excavate chocolate chips from hard and soft cookies and then they wrote about that on the little book that fits into their paleontologist jacket.

To end this lesson we made a chart comparing how many chocolate chips we were able to excavate from the two different cookies.  It's funny this helped them understand "how many more than" even though I spent weeks teaching that skill in isolation.  The miracle of units:)

Here are some pictures:

I am in full on Earth Day mode right now.  I cannot state how happy I am to have found Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers! I am so much more inspired to get creative and try new things.

I wanted to make an Earth Day poster for a while for my classroom and I needed a new testing sign.  Testing is coming up and someone always manages to come into my room while my kiddos are testing :/ I wouldn't mind so much, but my kids always get completely distracted when they see that door open.  It's hard for them to get back on track after that.  So when I was thinking of making my testing sign I realized I could make it a combo project and have both an Earth Day sign and testing sign in one!

So here is the Earth Day side:

I think I'm the last one on the behavior chart train, but I just found out about it from my BFF (happens to teach next door to me) and when I saw it I had to give it a try.

I started using it after spring break and WOW! It has made a huge difference in my classroom.  The kids take so much more responsibility for their actions and they strive to reach the top to the "Fabulous Falcon" mark.  I used "Fabulous Falcon" because our mascot is the falcon and our principal always says fabulous.  It went together really well.  I think I'm going to change the "Good Day" to "Awesome Day" or something like that.  I also want to reinforce that being on green is not bad.

Here is my chart:

I am new to teacher blogging but I have been blog stalking for a while :)  I have gotten so many ideas from amazing teachers and it inspired me to start documenting my teaching!

I was so happy to have found this linky party that Kindergarten Lifestyle!  If you teach K-2, you can link up your blog.