We finished up our school year with a unit on the ocean.  I took lots of pictures but the storage part of the blog was full!!  I will have to figure out what to do now because I loved posting the pictures of the activities! 
I created a movie of the rainforest and of our zoo trip using IMovie on the ipad!  If you don't have it, I am recommending it!!  It was so much fun!  Our team created a private YouTube account so we could pull our movies up and show them on the Promethean board for the end of the year program with our parents!  It was amazing! 

I can't believe how fast this summer has gone!  This is the first summer since my husband has retired so we have gone lots of places and done lots of things together.  I read the MathWork Stations by Debbie Diller. (I know I am a summer behind!)  I looked back and followed the book study from last summer as I read.  Wow...it was an eye opener!  I will definitely be adjusting my math station time. 

The Forest!

We watched a very cute You Tube song about toucans.  It told us that toucans eat fruit, berries, and seeds.  They are black and white with red, green and orange on them.  Hmmmm!

There is a wonderful You Tube video called Green Anaconda!  I sang it all last weekend because it got stuck in my head!!!  We each created our own rainforest snake.

 This was a great book and it was easy enough for the kids to read most of the words. We also went to Pebble Go and got lots of information about the animals from that.

These are our monkeys.  It was very interesting the way some of them came together.  Legs and arms and tails were everywhere!

 This is the map we colored showing where the tropical rainforest were found in our world.

We talked about how important it is to save the rainforest.  Lots of food and medicine come from the rainforest.  We talked about being a scientist and studying things from there.  We also talked about how fun it would be to be a photographer and take pictures of the animals there.

These next four slides show our literacy tubs for this week.  I forgot to take pictures last week!

 This was a fun exploring lesson.  I had 12 animals pictures posted around the room.  The kids had a recording sheet and a clipboard.  They had to explore the room and find the hidden animals and write the animal names on the sheet.

 In this game, the kids took turns spinning a spinner and putting a tally mark at the top part.  When time was called, they had to create a bar graph with their information.

 This tub had lots of words that the kids could practice copying in their journals.

This tub was fun.  The kids picked a card and copied the sentence on their journal.  They got to be the editor as there was no capital at the beginning of the sentence and no punctuation at the end!  These all came from Kelli Bordelon's unit.

 This is the book I downloaded several years ago (sorry but I don't remember where I got it).  It has lots of pictures about the frogs in the rain forest.

 These are the frogs we created and hung in the forest.  I put a few in the hall for our other classes to see but most are hanging around in the rainforest in our room.

 This is a great book I bought from scholastic one year.  It is hard to find books about sloths.  We did watch one on you tube with Jeff Corwin and it had lots of good information.

We created this sloth from instructions in the the unit from Kerri Bourdelon.  You should look her up and follow her on teacherspayteachers.  She has some great stuff!

Digraphs

We are going to learn about digraphs this last 4 weeks of school.  This week was ch.  We read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and created a tree with the letters on it.  We made a chart of ch words.

 This is a game where the kids sorted words that start with ch and those that have ch at the end of the word.

Rain Forest

 This is my very favorite unit.  There are so many cute things to make and ideas to talk about it.  The rainforest gives us so much...like chocolate!  Oh, and of course oxygen!!

Saw this cute post on Pinterest and bought the unit from Kerri Bordelon.  I love everything in it!

 We read this book and talked about patterns found in nature.  There are lots of examples in the rainforest of patterns on the animals.

 These are our torn paper alligators.  They are so cute and everyone is different.  Some were very small and some were very big!

 This is how the alligator pie turned out.  It was yummy.

These butterflies had lots of patterns and texture to them.  We glued small pieces of tissure paper to the cutouts. 

 One table got only blue paper to make the big blue morpho butterflies.

 The kids loved this story.  We saw a chameleon at the zoo last week so they could relate to this book.

 We waterpainted and they really like that!  I had two spills but...it all turned out fine!

We are doing a tree map book from Kerri's unit as well.  The kids are enjoying the research we are doing on the animals.  We have books and PebbleGo and United Streaming.

 This is one of the books with lots of information about the rainforest animals.

 We did several work sheets (as much as I do not like them!)  This one lets the kids sort the animals by attributes.

 This work sheet makes a graph of flowers.  They had to read the color words and cut the flowers out and glue them in the correct row.

After the zoo trip

 Mrs. Voss' smarties made a pop-up book with their favorite animal inside.  I LOVE the spelling!

We made lions for our zoo.  This animals were made from precut paper (by Miss Morte) and the kids put them together.   The patterns are from Mrs. Larramore.  I have lots of information from her blog, Chalktalk.

 This is a gorilla head.  It turned out so cute!

 This is a research paper done by Mrs. Shelton's class.  They recorded facts they learned about zebras.

 This research was done by Mrs. Voss' class.  It compares what was learned about zebras and giraffes.  The Venn diagram words are from Mrs. Jumps unit on teacherspayteachers. 

We made Elmer the elephant is my class today and Miss Morte had the kids write a list poem about elephants.

BUILD Tower

 This is the Books about math.  The kids like this tub.  There is no pressure to do anything except look at books.

 This tub has three dimensional shapes and cards of things in the world that are 3D.  The kids try to match them up.

 This is Independent work and the children roll a dice and write the next three numbers.  This has been a hard concept for them.  It is especiallly hard if they are asked to provide the numbers before a certain number!

 This tub had a game in it to work with numbers.  The cards had teen numbers.  The game is played like war.  The kids dealt the cards and turned over one at a time.  The highest number was the winner and got to keep both cards.

 Doing math this time had a paper the kids had to count the objects and write the correct number.

 This was another book box.  It had a book that the children read and colored.  It was about a watermelon that was divided half and fourth.

 Using manipulatives included a set of dice and a recording sheet.  The kids rolled the dice and added the dots together.  They found that number and colored it with a color pencil.

 This independent work included dice also.  The kids rolled the dice and traced that number on the paper.  The first number to have all traced was the winner.

 Learning numbers was popcorn numbers from 1-25.  The kids had to complete the chart.

Doing math in this tub required the child to look at the numbers and determine which was smaller and which was larger.  The largest number was colored red and the smallest number was colored blue.  It was graph review as well!