Egg-Cellent Five for Friday

Today is the start of what I have no doubt will be an Egg-Cellent three day weekend!! However, it is before seven and I am wide awake!  I am ready for summer so that I can retrain my body to sleep past 8 am!!  As promised, here I am back for my Friday weekly update, luckily I just happen to have enough energy to do this on a Friday and not my usual Saturday or Sunday!  :)

So here I go with my Five for Friday!

1.This week and week we spent some time talking about the night sky.  We have learned about where the moon gets its light from, the different phases of the moon, and how long it takes the moon to rotate the Earth. This week as we reviewed the phases of the moon the kids made a quick model of four of the most known phases.  I got this idea from a cute unit I bought last year, The Sun, The Moon, The Stars, from Yvonne Dixion over at Sassy in Second.  Wednesday and Thursday we spent some time talking about constellations and even making our own!  

2. If you ask my kids who my FAVORITE author is they will either tell you Mo Willems (my all time fave for chidlren’s books) and Gail Gibbions (I mean really who doesn’t love her books for teaching non-fiction!).  My favorite Mo Willems books though are all about Piggie and Elephant!  

 

I could tell you about 20 reasons why I love Mo Willems, but that would make this post excessively long, so I will just share one of the reasons that my kids have become obsessed!  I’m sure if you haven’t read the Don’t Let the Pigeon book series that you’ve at least heard about it.  This was Mo Willems first book series and so when he writes about others the pigeon gets jealous and “sneaks” into the books.  The pigeon is usually hidden in at least one place.  In some books you have to REALLY search to find him, but he’s there! This week we spent some time working on different activities that go along with his series about Knuffle Bunny.  I actually bought Hope King’s KnuffleBunny unit impulsively last year when I saw it due to my obsession with Mo Willems.  I didn’t ever end up actually using it last year, but when I saw Hope post about it a couple weeks ago and her suggestion of using it for Easter time, I was sold!  I quickly pulled open the unit and went through it finding things that I could throw into centers that my kids would love! Needless to say they had a blast using one of their our favorite book series to work on their skills of cause and effect, creating dialogue in their writing, and some fun with a Knuffle Bunny Glyph!  Next week I will be adding a few more things from the unit and things I've added discussing character traits and comparisons between the different books! 

 This was probably one of their favorite writing activities ever!! One of the unique things about Knuffle Bunny is that the background illustrations are all black and white photos and the characters are all animated.  The kids tried to use his inspiration and create a scene of their own! :) If you haven't read Knuffle Bunny, it's a must! 

3. We made it through four more chapters of Charlotte's Web this week!  Let me tell you, this is the kids favorite time of the day!  I love that they are just as excited about it as I am, one of my kids said after we read one of the chapters the other day "Man, this book just keeps getting better and better!"  The suspense of what is going to happen next (even though most of them have seen the movie) is exciting!  We all know that the books are MUCH better than the movies anyway! 

4.  If you caught my post earlier this week, you learned that Sunday night part of my attic fell into my garage.  Yep, that was fun, NOT!  You also would have learned that I got my NEW MACBABY!!! One of the very first things I did after I backed up all of my files from old Macbaby thanks to the awesomeness of the time capsule was create something new and fun for centers.  For some reason, compound words are never explicitly taught in second, however a review, especially when there are compound words on our assessments, is always great for my centers.  So I made a little compound word FREEBIE to share with you all! There are two different ways you can do this, you can have them do it independently and have students complete the recording sheet so you can check to make sure they really understand or they can play memory or you can have them do it independently first and then play memory with a buddy.  All of the above are possible. I also have it in color and the cards in black in white.  Whatever is best for your liking!  Click below to grab it FREE from my TPT store! 

5.  I have decided to take part in the Egg-Cellent Sellers Sale!  Go check out my store to find what my favorite five sellers are! :) 

I hope you all have a great Easter weekend!!
 

Always Love!

Whew, I don't know about you, but Monday exhausted me!  However, I do mean that in the best way possible!  Today was an in-service day for us and it was by far the best in-service day E.V.E.R!  We went on a team building trip to a local retreat, we probably worked through at least 10 different activities, including zip lining, ninja (a time filler game) and archery!  I can't pick a "favorite" because really, I loved everything we did, seriously there wasn't one thing I didn't enjoy! :)  It helped that I had an awesome group that I worked through it all with! :)

I said last week that it was my goal to get done with literacy centers and math centers this past weekend.... well, I just finished my literacy centers tonight.  Thankfully, I even have almost all of them prepped and ready to go for tomorrow! However, I haven't finished my math centers, so I guess we will just continue to spiral what I have stored from last year until I am able to get finished!  I am loving these activities, mostly because the kids are going to have a ball with them!  :)

I was also able to get my character trait posters ALMOST done.  The ones that are done have already been laminated with my personal lamenator (my new obsession) and are hanging in the room.  As soon as I go back through and edit a few little things, they will be uploaded to TPT!

So Monday flew by and if I don't make this short and sweet it will be Tuesday before I get to bed! ;)  As much as I don't mean to make time fly by, I'm wayyyy excited for this weekend!! I get to not only see my best friend, Lindsey and a several other good friends, but I also get to see one of my all time FAVORITE Texas Country Singers, Wade Bowen!  Check out the song below, definitely my newest favorite of his...maybe because it reminds me of motherhood..even though it's referring to fatherhood... I guess just plain ol' parenthood! I hope you all have a wonderful week and maybe I'll have an opportunity to blog again this week about the SDE conference, I STILL have so much to share!!!!