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Sunday, January 12, 2014

Five for Friday

Happy New Year!
Sorry it has been a while.. I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and are enjoying getting back into the swing of things in your classrooms!
I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs for Five for Friday! Here are 5 random things from the past week. I hope you'll check out what other teachers have been up to as well!

http://doodlebugsteaching.blogspot.com/
 
1. Polar Vortex
How many of you had an extra long Christmas Break, as I did, thanks to the Polar Vortex?? It was absolutely frigid here. Negative temps with windchills around -25 Monday and Tuesday of last week. Due to this, we were off school. Although I have honestly had enough snow days to suit me for a while, I was very thankful that I didn't have to take Amelia outside! Here is one way we kept busy! My girl is not a fan of messy hands that come with finger painting, but she LOVED when I handed her this sponge brush! We had a ball!
 
2. Fun Christmas gifts
 
We had purchased a science kit from Learning Express for my cousin Josh for Christmas. It looked like so much fun! I insisted, and his mom appreciated, that he come over to perform the experiments! We had fun making all kinds of gross things like snot and vomit. We started "growing" a brain and also took some germs from my cell phone and put in a petri dish to see how much bacteria we could grow! Here are a few pics of him having a blast!
 
 
 
 
3. Cricut
 
I borrowed a friend's Cricut to make a baby shower banner for my friend's upcoming baby shower. She had helped me to make something before, but this is the first time I used one by myself. Such a neat machine! I think I've decided it makes more sense for me to buy a Sillhouette Cameo, but it was still fun to try out the Cricut!
 


 
 
 
4. Word Families
After we did make it back to school this week, we began working on some Short A word families. Here we were searching for words in the -at and -an word families in our book titled "Zac the Rat." We use Starfall's reading series called "More Starfall" which I truly love- but that's another subject :)
 
 
 
5. Adding and Subtracting
To get back into the swing of things with adding and subtracting, we played this little game with some labeled dice that I purchased from a teacher store. I wrote -1, -2, -3 and +1, +2, +3. Students work with a partner and have a container of 20 counters total. Each student starts with 5 counters and the rest stay inside the container. They take turns rolling the dice, and then adding/ subtracting. The goal is to end up with zero counters. They really loved this! We'll definitely be playing it again!
 
 
I hope everyone enjoyed their week! Be sure to check out what other teachers have been up to!