Dictionary Dice Drills

If your students are like mine, they struggle finding words in a dictionary. I created a dice roll game to help them practice. We do add a vocabulary word to our personal dictionaries every week, but some of my students are still taking nearly 10 minutes to find a word! (We've done this since October.) This is a literacy center game that can be played multiple days in a row. With three game boards this should keep them busy and practicing for a while! Click here to find the game and let your students have fun using a dictionary too!

Ruler Bin

Our rulers never could find the right home, so we decided a container was needed. I'm all about reusing, so I grabbed the Clorox wipes container we just threw away, washed it out, and decorated it with paper rulers. Now they kids know right where to go when they need a ruler!

April Showers Art

This week we worked on the color concepts of black and white in art class. Students drew lines on white paper, cut it out, then glued it to black paper leaving spaces. They turned out pretty well!

We also made April Showers umbrellas. You can find the template I created here. The kids had a blast choosing their bright colors and painting their umbrellas! My favorite part of painting projects are the adorable orange aprons I picked up at the dollar store for them to wear :)

March Fun!

So far this March we have focused our morning work writing around St. Patrick's Day. The kids wrote letters to a leprechaun explaining why he should share his gold, or what their plan was to take his gold. They wrote about their favorite green things and what they would do with a pot of gold too. It is always fascinating to see what they come up with. We had a spectrum from save the gold so I'd be rich, to buy lots of toys, to spend it all buying toys for kids who were in need. They never stop amazing me :)

For art last week we made rainbows leading to the pot of gold. I saw the idea on Pinterest, but had to make a few adjustments to suit what we had available in our class. I cut the paper the width of the ruler, decreasing by 1 cm each strip. Red is the longest. Then we stapled them together on each end to make the arc. The raindrops the kids traced on a fold then cut out. It is 3 drops glued together to make 3-D drops. We glued 2 cotton balls to each side of the staple to hide them. They I added the pipe cleaners to hold the raindrops and the rainbows. The kids loved it, and as they are obsessed with rainbows currently, it was a project that kept them fully engaged and happy! Who knows, maybe the sun will come out soon and we can see one in person too! 

On Friday, while the kids were in music, a leprechaun visited our room! He sure was mischievous too. We set a trap using our reading pointer, the empty math  practice box, and our treasure chest. The kids were certainly hopeful to catch him, but we let them know they are very sneaky and we had never heard of one being caught. When we returned from music the treasure box was open and the treasures were scattered, he put silly sunglasses on some of our stuffed animals, he toppled over all the water bottles and even two chairs! He also left us a note on the board that we couldn't catch him. Worst of all, he took a bite out of one of the cupcakes! They just loved it and continued searching the room in case he was still there. Lucky for them, he left everyone a few pieces of gold too :)