Making Inferences

I saw this idea on The Inspired Apple and thought it was great.  We have been talking about drawing conclusions this week and practicing inferring during our group reading of the BFG by Roald Dahl.  

The kids were fascinated as I pulled things out of my purse and did a great job on their own papers making inferences about other items that we did not put on the anchor chart list.  

Butterfly Life Cycle

We have gotten two little caterpillars from our science teacher.  We voted on names and chose Mario and Lexi.  I could not find the observation journal I have used in the past for charting the changes in the life cycle, so we are making a powerpoint version together as a class. 

Every few days we will take some pictures of our caterpillars and add them to our power point.  The kids will describe what they observe happening and compare to previous observations.  I will post an update later on in this project!

Chinese New Year

For Chinese New Year we watched some videos and made a graphic organizer about how people celebrate.  We also looked at the Chinese Zodiac and read about the personalities of the animals for the years the students were born.

They wrote about how they planned to celebrate Chinese New Year and made dragon masks with construction paper to decorate.  They came out pretty great!

Plants and Seeds

We have started to study life cycles, beginning with plants.  We dissected some lima bean seeds to observe the beginnings of the roots and leaves.  Then we wrapped some additional beans in paper towels and put them in a plastic bag taped to the window.  Some are starting to sprout!

We are watering and observing our lima beans every few days to see how they change.  Some of the beans have gotten a little moldy.  I do not have a green thumb, so I'm not sure what I should have done differently.  If you have any advice, please comment!

Martin Luther King Day

I saw this idea for a really cute writing activity on pinterest.  Great directions for how to make the artwork can be found here.  I cut all the paper ahead of time and made my own as I helped the kids step by step.  

The writing prompt they were given was to write about a dream they have for the future.  They wrote the cutest, sweetest things!



On a separate note, although I have had parents sign media release forms for the photos, I have gone back through all the photos on my blog and added little sunglasses or pencil stickers using picnik in order to protect the anonymity of my students.  In the future I will not add photos of the children themselves, and just focus on their work.

Santa writing

I got this idea from a post on pinterest.  I thought my kids would be excited to make these.  They came out so cute in all their different shapes and sizes.  

The sentence starter I gave them was: "Oh no, Santa is stuck in my chimney!"  I asked them to come up with three ideas for how to get Santa out.  We wrote our three ideas on a graphic organizer and shared them out before beginning our first draft, or sloppy copy.  Doing a "status of the class" share out like that is helpful for my kids because they get to see many examples and ideas that they can feed off of.  I am so proud of how their writing is improving!

Holiday party

This year for our holiday party I tried to plan activities to celebrate all three of the major winter holidays.  We studied Chanukah, Kwanzaa, and Christmas.  It is always a shock to my students that I don't celebrate Christmas so it's personally motivating for me to teach them about other cultures.  I want them to embrace their differences.

Our Chanukah activity was making handprint menorahs.  I showed the students photos of myself with different menorahs over the years, and we also read books and saw some videos.  They were really excited about this activity.

For our Christmas activity, we made reindeer brownies.  Usually I insist that the snack we have at parties is healthy, but when I saw these, they were so cute I had to change my mind.  We used store bought brownies, cut into triangles, white icing, pretzels, gumdrops and hershey's bites.  The kids loved them!

For Kwanzaa, I wanted to dye pasta and make necklaces, but I did not prepare for that in enough time to make it happen.  Next I thought of making red, green and black placemats woven with strips of paper.  We ended up running out of time for this, so I sent it home with them to complete.


I put a free streaming radio Christmas music station on and we had a dance party to burn off all our sugar!