Five for Friday

It's been another busy week! But then again, when is it never busy????

Best way to sum up the week is to join Doodle Bugs Teaching's Five for Friday Linky Party!! Here we go...

1. We opened our new unit, "Keep Trying" on Monday. To start off the unit, we came up with some things we could say to encourage ourselves or others to not give up and keep trying.

2. Forgot to take a picture of our Oratorical program to include here but Wednesday was our school oratorical event! All the grades took turns performing for the parents first thing in the morning. Then after school, we had our oratorical assembly and everyone got to watch each others' performances! Pretty much took up all of Wednesday (our minimum day) but it was good. 

3. We are now reading anthology books! First graders are growing up! Woohoo! Our first reading was on "The Itsy Bitsy Spider". Did you know there were way more verses than the spider climbing the water spout? The kids didn't! We talked about cause and effect in the story/poem/song and charted it. 

4. I really need to blog about my art mom and her incredible art lessons with the kids. She comes up with some great ideas and the kids just love them! This week's lesson wrapped up our focus on texture. We look at the artwork of Peter Clark, a contemporary collage artist. We also talked about how manipulating paper in different ways can created texture. Then we created our own collage dogs!

5. We had to say good-bye and empty out our terrariums today since we have to return our science kits next week. But! Thanks to the idea of my first grade colleague, we didn't simply just dump the stuff out, I actually had the kids work together to empty their terrariums out step by step. First, we used tongue depressors to turn the soil so that we could pull out the plants. Then they went on a digging excavation to look for our living organisms (worms and pill bugs). Boy, was this an exciting moment for all the kids! I gathered all the living organisms in a plastic bag so that we could pass it on to the principal for his compost bin at home.

That's all for now folks! Report cards are due next Friday! Better get started! :)