Affiliate Post: 10 Earth Day Freebies on Educents!

Earth Day is April 22nd, how will you celebrate this year? Some activities I have written in my plans are to read about the earth and recycling, create an Earth day craft that will talk about ways to help save the Earth, and even write an opinion piece about whether to recycle or not! If you need some ideas for Earth Day activities, Educents has 10 different Earth Day freebies for you to try in your classroom! Check them out below!

10 Earth Day Freebies for Kids

1. Earth Day Sort - Help kids learn the difference between reducing, reusing, and recycling!
2. Happy Earth Day Writing Activity - Kids of all ages can reflect on ways their family, school, and themselves can help keep the Earth healthy. Also encourages handwriting practice!
3. Earth Day Coloring Pages - Creative kiddos can color the Earth with their colors of choice, or follow the color-by-code page to add critical thinking to art hour.
4. Earth Day Poof! Subtraction to 5 - This Earth Day themed game builds fluency with subtraction facts to 5. It can be played in a small group or as a partner game. It is a fun way to practice those facts!
5. Earth Day Word Search Freebie - Enjoy this Earth Day themed word search puzzle with 21 eco-friendly terms like atmosphere, compost, and recycle.
6. Earth Day Bookmarks - The perfect Earth Day treat for your students. Available in full-color and black-and-white.
7. Earth Day Survey and Graph - A fun and different way to practice graphing in your classroom while encouraging collaboration between students.
8. Spring Coloring Book - Let your little ones COLOR & SPELL Spring words.
9. Love the Earth Mystery Picture Graph - Students will love discovering the mystery picture by coloring in the correct squares on the alphanumeric grid using the coordinates given. This is a great addition to an Earth Day or recycling unit!
10. April 2015 Journal - A month of free journaling for learners age 8 to 100! Read about important historic, artistic, and current events that happened during the month of April - including J. Robert Oppenheimer's birthday and Earth Day on April 22nd. Then develop vocabulary and critical thinking skills.

Want to turn your Earth Day celebration into an educational experience? Discover new ways to learn about the amazing planet we live on (without breaking the bank!) -->  Earth Day learning resources.

Five for Fraturday: Spring Break Edition [PICTURE HEAVY!]

You know that time when you almost finished typing up the post and then realized that your phone hadn't finished uploading the pictures to the post? Well apparently once the pictures are finished being uploaded all your typing and formatting goes away! Back to square one!

So I didnt make it to Friday again. It IS spring break though so I get to cut myself some slack, right? Or not...

The boyfriend and I spent three nights in Vegas during the beginning of the break so at least half (or most) of this post will be about Vegas....

The first night in vegas was spent wandering the new Hershey's Chocolate world in New York New York...

Made completely out of chocolate. How does it not melt?!

I only took a picture of this because the cupcakes were GINORMOUS!

...then splurging on dinner at Tom Colicchio's Craftsteak...

...and ending it with a Jabbawockeez show (with a free seat upgrade)!

Day 2 was spent wandering the Bellagio to check out their cherry blossom/Japanese garden display.

...lunch at Gordon Ramsay's Burgr

The coffee milkshake with hazelnut pudding on top was DIVINE!

...and ending with a Cirque du Soleil: Mystere show at night! (And another free seat upgrade! We were moved from the back section to the third row in the front section!)

Day 3 was SUPER windy, so much so that it was almost unhealthy to even go outside! (So much dust blowing around!) So we decided to stay indoors. We stayed at the Excalibur so just took the tram to Mandalay Bay to visit the Shark Reef Aquarium...

...and ended the day with a dinner buffet at the Wicked Spoon Buffet in the Cosmopolitan.

Can't leave Vegas without having at least one buffet! And yes, I ate all of the food in the picture!

Spring break also allowed me to have some extra cuddling time with my best furry friend...Snap!

He has his own instagram account! Become a follower today!

This is from today, but it still counts in this post because it's Fraturday, right? :)

A new playground just opened in my city today

This playground is very special because it was created specifically to be handicap friendly, but allows EVERYONE (disabled or not) to be able to play on everything in the playground. 

I personally think the music zone is the best, because you get to play a laser harp!

So cool! Just wave your hands (or if you are like me, run) underneath the arch of the harp and listen to the music you create!

It was very exciting to see such a cool new and innovative playground! To learn more about Magical Bridge Playground and it's origins, click here. 

Okay, I made it to the end. Hopefully you did too! Spring break was super busy but in a fun way. Despite the busyness, I was able to stay away from school work until today. It must have helped because I'm actually feeling ready to get back into the classroom! 

Hope everyone else's spring break was (or will be) just as fun as mine! :D

Five for Friday

The week is finally over and Spring Break has officially begun! I think I was either too excited about the break or too busy to remember to take more pictures. But here we go anyway!

Monday is our Starting Arts rotation. We've been through theater, dance, music, and are now on art. Our most recent arts project is creating a color wheel using watercolors to mix the colors. 

We also planted seeds this week! Of course, I did some poor planning here because our rye grass seeds will probably end up sprouting and growing over the break. Oops...

I've made it a goal of mine to try to create bright and colorful anchor charts that I can laminate and hold to for future use. Some anchor charts are based on ones I see on Pinterest while others just come straight from my head. We talked about compound words this week so of course, an anchor chart was needed!

Since I am out of classroom pictures for this week, I will share this awesome dinner I had on Thursday during our weekly dinner dates. Softshell crab sliders! I believe that's a whole crab in each slider! Absolutely delicious!

I'll leave you all with a picture of our family pup, Snap. We adopted him last August and he's brought a lot of excitement into this household since then. We've been told he's a shih-tzu/terrier mix. More research online makes us believe he might be a Jacktzu (Jack Russell Terrier mix). I just created an instagram for him so follow him if you want to see more pictures of this awesome and cute dog!

Well friends, it's time for Spring Break to officially begin. It will start with a Vegas trip with the boyfriend for three nights (Sun-Wed). Can't wait! :D

Five for Funday

I tried to make the Five for Friday post on Friday, I swear! Unfortunately things got in the way and I didn't get home on Friday until almost 10! Then I tried for Saturday (had all the pictures uploaded for the post), but didn't get to writing either because I was out all day. And it's Sunday now, but I can finally sit down and write about week! Good because I'm spending some quality time away from schoolwork, but bad because it's making it hard to get back into blogging!

Ok, enough of my blabbing, time to Five for Sunday (or Funday!)

Last week's phonics focus was on "ar". Besides blending some "ar" words, we also did an "ar" word sort.

Last week's comprehension skill was on inference. Since it was the week of April Fools, I thought riddles would nicely tie into the week. What better skill to practice than inferring when it comes to solving riddles?

We ended the week by writing our own riddles about ourselves and having our classmates guess (I mean infer) using the sentence frames to see if they were correct!

Can you guess this one?

Math is all about place value right now. This week was focused on comparing two-digit numbers. I've always used the "Allie the alligator" method with my students in the past. However, during my district's summer institute this year, I learned a different little trick involving drawing dots and connecting them to create the greater than and less than symbols. It made so much more sense so I tried it out and it definitely worked!

We also started our opinion writing unit this week. I base my lessons off of Lucy Calkins Units of Study for writing. The opinion unit starts off with writing about our collections. The kids brought in collections from home, judged them fairly, and chose a winner. Then they had to write about the winner and state reasons for it winning. By the end of the week, we were self-editing our writing to see if we had 5 star+ writing. It's been so much fun watching all my students become more independent and taking more ownership of their writing! I also really love this writing rubric. I was a freebie on TpT! The pack also comes with a rubric for informative and narrative writing, which I will definitely use next year!

With all our time filled with some other activities, I was able to slip a short and simple art lesson in. The students were given a simple template and asked to turn it into a creature hatching from an Easter egg. There were some sample outlines that I displayed on the projector (a minion was one of them so plenty of students drew that), but some students went above and beyond and created there own!

Finally, I will end with some not so nice and nice pictures of food.

Found this lovely friend inside my mussell. I think it's a tiny crab?

A yummy chocolate tart!

The weekend is almost over, but I hope you all had a good one! Happy Easter and have a wonderful Spring Break for those of you who are lucky to have it already. I still have to wait another week. Hopefully I can make it through! :)