Happy Easter!

I hope your weekend has been relaxing and full of fun time with your family, mine sure has been! I've been busy at work this weekend, too!  Not only did I manage to stock up on some great items from TPT due to the wonderful sales, but I managed to update my Charlotte's Web Unit, already!  I added versions of the book in color as well as the black and white!  I also added vocabulary cards that go along with the book, with and without definitions.  If you already purchased the unit, please go download it again for the new additions! :)

As I began thinking about this coming week and what I am teaching for Social Studies.... I became a little worried that I needed something to help teach this unit.  In the past, I have always used the lesson about the Tired King, Louie and his kingdom, to introduce government.  If you don't have any clue what I'm talking about you can click here and find the PDF version.  Basically, it is a story about how the king divided up his responsibilities among three departments, the law makers, the guards, and the judges.  Students then participate in an activity where they read letter from the people of the kingdom and students must decide which department is responsible for handling the letter.  Since this lesson is always such a huge hit, I will of course use it again! :)

This is not where I began to panic, my panic set in about the days following this lesson.  I am supposed to teach about the three branches of government, their responsibilities, and about our government leaders.  I needed something to easy to handle that the kids wouldn't lose and could actively be used as a resource.  This is the same type of panic that set in when I decided to create My Communities Interactive Book!  Since this book was such a BIG hit not only with my kids, but also as a resource in my TPT store, I figured something of this sort would solve my problem! Thus, I created my What is Government Interactive Book! I'm really excited about this, mostly because my kids LOVE having their own little book to use as a resource!  Seriously, we will be working on an assignment and they will ask to use their resource(s).  Makes a teacher happy, or at least this one!  :)  This book includes a table of contents, headings, sub headings, pictures, bolded text, and a glossary to help reinforce those wonderful non-fiction text features.

Now that I have my panic resolved, I need to get on making sub plans for Tuesday and Wednesday since I am being pulled to test students on the STARR test.  Yay for standardized testing, NOT!  So in my attempt to get started and not be a huge procrastinator, I will leave you some pictures from this morning! 

Wishing you all a marvelous week! :)