Creative Lesson Cafe: May 2014

Five for Friday~ End of the Year Crafts and Fun!

There will be only one more Friday for me this year so I thought I'd get with the program here while I still can share some classroom fun! It's been a while since I have had any time to get together a Five for Friday post. So much goes on during a week, that I hardly know where to start! Things are winding down and there has been a hodge podge of activity in the classroom~ some academic but mostly fun!

The last mega bulletin board of the year was finished and hung which was a huge mission accomplished. When coordinating it with three other classrooms, it takes a while for us to all craft, write and then hang the work! MEGABOARD spans the length of the hallway. It turned out great!The kids did such a nice job with the writing to tell about the "write" stuff from they learned in second grade! Our school is big on using Thinking Maps for prewriting, so it was the first time they used a four square organizer with transition words.

I also was able to use my new circle letters for the first time to make a BIG title that really pops!

Because of the long holiday weekend, we finished up some of our Memorial day activites that carried over on Tuesday. The students made this cute I heart the flag craftivity from A Cupcake for the Teacher.

We also sported these headbands to show our patriotism!

The badge pattern is from an old resource book by Carson Dellosa.

The children have been learning about landforms in social studies. We worked our our little landform pictionary books too. I have plans to redesign this during the summer and will share it with you!

Between all of the fun, I have been busy with testing. I wish DRA would just go away. At the level most of my second graders are working at, the test includes a great deal of writing and it takes FOREVER. The district sets the grade level benchmark, but we take the students to their highest level, often giving up to four very time-consuming tests to find it. We assess with a total of three measures, three times a year, in the area of reading using DRA, Star and MAP.

The Sterilite container in the photo is great for storing assessments both finished and those that the students need to finish. I have stacks of DRAs from the year inside. I also like to work smart and have my ipad next to me and enter data for fluency, nonfiction text features, comprehension and retellings immediately after testing so it is all fresh in my head.

Our fun and crafty week ended with the big hoorah the kids look forward to all year-FIELD DAY!

We lucked out with a beautiful day for it!

Water bottle relay is always a favorite!

The student wearing the bag usually has to lay down holding the bottle for an extra challenge!

The team that gets the most water in the bottle, not on the kid, wins!

It was a great fun-filled week!

What fun did you have this week?

Link up at Doodle Bugs too!

End of the Year Poem to Parents

Ending the school year is bittersweet, especially when it means saying goodbye to the children and families we have grown so close to. Parents trust us to care for, nuture, inspire and protect their precious little ones (and big kids too). During the year, we help them to grow in every way. This sweet little poem is something I like to print on colored paper to send home on the last day inside my student's keepsake boxes!

Isn't it so precious?

There are a few different font options too!

It is sure to bring tears to your parents' eyes when they read it!

If you would like a copy, you can download it here!

For my teacher friends who start in a month other than September, or don't end in June, leave me a comment and I'll post a revision for you!

You'll want to check back again for the link!

Top Ten List of Things I Want to do this Summer!

Happy Memorial Day Friends! This holiday marks the unofficial start of summer for us in Michigan because the pools, water parks and beaches open today! It's been such a fantastic blue sky weekend! Last night fireworks rocked the neighborhood and today the smell of barbecue fills the air...Summer sights, smells and sounds are here and I am beyond excited! All year long, I dream of summer vacation. Summer is my time to catch up on fun family time, me time and all kinds of projects I don't have time for and get pushed aside during the school year. Time just goes WAY too fast though. I hope to make this summer LAST! I'm joining Mrs. Jump's Class for this fun Ten Things I Want to do this Summer linky!

My summer will be fun and productive!

What is number one on your summer top ten list?

Let us know and then head on over to Mrs. Jump's class to see what others have on their list!

The Best School Supplies for Second Grade

These supplies are always sharp!

Twistables for coloring fine details and mechanical pencils for handwriting lessons and publishing are my favorite supplies!

What are your favorites on the student supply list?

End of the Year Projects~ Pizza Keepsake Boxes and Memory Books

Boy this year just flew by! I can't believe that next week we start our end of the year projects! I am sitting here this evening printing the pages I need to make our oh, so cute pizza boxes! This is a tradition of mine and I consider it and the contents inside (like a DVD of class photos) to be my gift to the students and families!

My mom did a lovely job coloring this example for the photo shoot, don't you think? She had fun making it! Mom comes in every year at this time (and weekly too) to help me. She assembles the boxes and passes out all of the children's treasures I have been saving.

One project from each month and all sorts of goodies like pick sticks, cubby tags and other special items get sent home in the box. The kids have a blast looking through all of their crafts while remembering all of the fun themes we had throughout the year! The parents go crazy when they come home and absolutely LOVE the boxes!

I took a trip out this weekend to Gordon Food Service to pick up some small white boxes. I was happy to walk out of there with 50 boxes for $15.00! Local pizza places will often donate boxes too if you smile and tell them you are a teacher!

What else is in the box? When you lift the lid, there is a cute page of ABC's through the year. I type up some special things that we have done during the year that begin with that first letter. Inside is a sentence completion page about the year too. I always personalize a special poem for each child to include. All of those pages are in the Pizza Box Craftivity.

NEW THIS YEAR... I thought it would be really cute to add a slice of pizza to the box in the form of a shape book!

Presenting...Slices of my Year Memory Book!

As we look back at the year, we will use the brainstorming sheet that is included to generate some ideas for writing on each page of the book.

There is one page for each slice, or month, of the year!

Here is how my example turned out:

It looks good enough to eat! I printed mine in color, but there are black and white covers for the students to color too. Covers are created for Kindergarten, First, Second and Third Graders.

~~FLASH FREEBIE ALERT!~~

~~This brand new item will be free for the next two hours!~~

~~Head over to my store and grab a copy to try out with your class!~~

~~I hope you like it! :)~~

I like looking back with these kinds of activities as much as the kids do.

We always end the year feeling wildly accomplished!

Dancing Raisins Experiment: Simple Science Fun!

We had good, fizzy fun with the scientific method today as we performed a dancing raisins experiment! This one is a favorite of mine every year because it is so simple to prep and set up. All you need is some Sprite, a clear cup and one raisin for each child. Then, drop the raisins in the soda and watch the magic of science excitement fill the room!

This was our introduction to our Being a Scientist unit.

We talked about each step of the scientific method along the way using these cute cards from Ginger Snaps.

The kids felt like REAL scientists as they created a hypothesis, made observations and recorded along the way with a Raisin Experiment lab sheet from What the Teacher Wants.

Thankfully, it doesn't say Dancing Raisins at the top of the worksheet because that would be a spoiler!

I wanted the kids to be totally surprised and they were!

Some students thought the raisin might explode.

Others thought the pop might turn brown.

One student was sure the teacher was going to shake the whole bottle of Sprite first and let it erupt everywhere!

He must have seen that Diet Coke and Mentos experiment on an episode of MythBusters!

The kids were bursting with excitement as they saw our raisins begin to dance!

We talked about how the carbonation in the pop is air. The bubbles attach to the rough surface of the raisin. When enough bubbles form, it makes the raisins bouyant and they rise to the top. At the surface, the bubbles pop and the raisins sink again.

This was also a great experiment for tying in some review of solids, liquids and gases.

We decided NOT to dump out the cups afterward, but instead will leave them all weekend and return to make more observations of the changes we see on Monday!

I just love seeing the kids get so excited about activities like these.

I wish we had time in our days to do more!

This would be a super easy thing to have ready to go to keep your students engaged in the last remaining days!

What are some of your favorite simple science experiments?

Hooray for Arrays! Building Arrays Work Mats for Math Centers

Hooray for arrays and for second graders feeling like third graders doing multiplication and division!

We like candy math in our room as you may remember from my other posts!

Tomorrow we are building arrays with m&m's!

Each student will build an array of their choice on their mat. Then we will number our spiral notebooks, stand up and scoot around to 10 desks that look as if they have an array that isn't already recorded. The class will have to write the repeated addition sentence and the multiplication sentence that each array shows. I will roam the room and be sure they are on track!

We did a similar activity yesterday when I introduced the concept for the first time. I just asked the class to make an array on their desk that shows objects in rows and columns. There were some blank stares and some who already knew what to do. This was wonderful for assessing where each of them were with prior knowledge.

Afterward, we took a gallery walk and looked at all of them. We had a great discussion about which arrays were correct and which were not good examples and why. We also had a quality number talk about the ways in which an array is like (or not like) fractions (as a way to introduce division concepts).

I know it's not February, so please excuse the candy hearts, but it's all that I had enough of at the time. The kids didn't seem to mind revisiting Valentine fun. My little sweethearts know teacher keeps candy counters of all kinds as manipulatives! We never eat them, of course!

After building the m&m's arrays, the kids will each get to visit the bingo marker station that is set up to dot up their own colorful array project to take home!

You can get a copy of the workmat and bingo page here.

Freebies for Sylvester and the Magic Pebble~ Caldecott Love!

It seems every time I get ready to read a book, hands go up and students are just bursting to tell me that they know the story. This week, I am digging out all of the older Caldecott books I have in my collection. These are some of the greatest stories ever written and I want my littles to enjoy them too. I doubt that they have heard them already!

Today, we were working on making predictions that dig deeper, using clues and our schema to make good ones that go beyond the text read. Predictions are hard to make when you have already heard a story before!

The medal winner from 1970, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, was the perfect story to use! The kids absolutely LOVED it because it was brand new to them!

I read just a few pages, and then stopped (Oh, the suspense!) and allowed the students to write in their reading response notebooks.

Tomorrow we will complete another page about the accuracy of our predictions.

This is such a fantastic read aloud for so many reasons! It has tons of rich vocabulary and lends itself well to working on many reading skills! I have big plans for this book for next year, but we are winding down and just don't have the time to get into a big unit!

But we will do some creative writing and summarizing with these pages!

As I am posting this with a killer sore throat...I was thinking what great pages these would be to leave with a sub!
You can download the printables here if you like!

How fun would it be to give each student a magic pebble of their own?

Maybe next year...

Hope your week is off to a great start!

Clock Flowers and Minutes Past the Hour!

I wanted to share a fun activity we worked on for our May bulletin board! We practiced telling time to five minute intervals and made a project at the same time! See how cute they turned out!

The flower pattern is from Amy Lemons time unit. I hope she doesn't mind, because I didn't see the new revision :), but I modified the craft a bit to make it more of a math station activity to review for MAP testing.

First, I printed some rainbow arrows from Jen at Teaching in the Tongass to use as clock hand manipulatives. I also printed a sheet of digital clocks from Teacher Gems.

I had some great task cards from Rachel Lynette all copied and so I decided to do a scoot activity where each station required the students to model the time with the flower clocks and then use the recording sheet to write the correct answer.

Once we finished the scoot, whichever task card was on the student's desk was the one they had to show on the clock project. They glued down the clock hands and wrote in the digital time. The digital clock is glued to one leaf.

The kids had a fun time with telling time and now, we have a colorful May Flowers bulletin board!

Hershey Bar Fractions

Do you have a favorite unit of all time? If I had to choose, I would say that this sweet one tops them all! It's fraction fun in a chocolate bar theme without the mess!

This pack contains all of the printables you may need for a really fun fraction unit that your students will surely remember!

At the end of the unit, I always give my students a little sweet treat to reward them for their hard work!