3rd Annual Writer's Showcase!

Ok - so I fully intended on blogging about our Research and Writing Projects along the way these last 4 weeks.  We have been so crazy busy that I couldn't even hardly check my emails, much less keep up with this lil' ole blog.  

We just had our 3rd Annual - First Grade Writer's Showcase.  It was a huge success and we had such a fun time getting to see our students and their parents.

I've created 5 different animal research and writing project units.  We have 6 first grade teachers and each teacher researches a different animal group.  We have Woodland, Rain forest, Safari, Ocean, Polar and Farm units.  (you can click into each animal set to take a closer look)  Each teacher spends about 4 weeks on these projects.  We ask our students and parents to create an art project at home to go along with them.  

Here are some pics right before we let parents in the door. :)

We totally transformed our classroom into a forest!  We spent 4 weeks reading, studying and researching our woodland animals.  I get very excited every year when we get these started.  My firsties do an amazing job every year.  I'm always blown away by how much they truly do enjoy all the hard work they put forth.  Their books end up being about 15-20 pages long!

Here are some pics of our research along the way:

     

     

If you're looking for any research ideas feel free to click on any of the projects above to get a closer look.  Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Plants and Butterflies!

It has been sooooo busy in our classroom the last few weeks.  I absolutely love Spring and all the fun things we learn about.  We "planted" our seeds and put them in the window so we could watch the roots and stems grow.

 

 A little photo-bombing from our student teacher - LOVE HER!!!!!!!!!!

 
 After they sprouted we took them down and wrote about them in their journals.

Then we got to plant them in soil!

We also studied the life cycle of a butterfly.  These pics are a little blurry because I was taking them through the net.

 I was so excited about this picture because you can see the proboscis as it's sucking from the orange.

We really enjoyed them but had to let them go.  One was pretty stubborn and I had to do a little coaxing but it finally flew away.

If we weren't already busy enough, we just started our Woodland Animal Research and Writing Project!  More to come on that later!



Have a great rest of the weekend!

Dinosaurs, Pet Rocks and Caterpillars - Oh My!

Ok - you all know we are in the BUSIEST time of the year - right?!?!?!?  We have a ton of different things going on in our classroom right now.  Here are just a few:

Dinosaur Excavations:

We read "Mister Bones - Dinosaur Hunter" in our Reading series this week.

This was such an awesome idea from one of my coworkers to go along with this story.  My firsties absolutely LOVED this activity.  They worked so hard and took their time trying to excavate the bones (chocolate chips) from the rock and dirt (cookie).

Pet Rocks:

Since we were talking about dinosaurs, excavating and dirt, we decided to adopt a pet rock!

Oh my goodness!  It was so fun to watch them paint their rocks.  They could not wait to take them home!  The Pet Rock Adoption idea came from First Class Teacher Resources.

Caterpillars:

Our caterpillars finally came in!  We cannot wait to watch them change and turn into butterflies!

We will be learning all about butterflies next week and "journaling" all the changes we see!