Happy weekend! I hope everyone had a great week teaching young minds! I’m sure everyone is just as busy as we are….and tired. Hello exhaustion. Like falling asleep with the iPad in my hands every night tired… I hope everyone rests and relaxes this weekend! And for your relaxation enjoyment, here’s what we did this week!
This week we met our friend Pirate Mark! Pirate Mark helps us read -ar- words because pirates say “AAARRRGGH!” We had a blast reading ar words with our pirate voices, thinking of ar words for our Pirate Mark anchor chart (notice Target….just sayin… and helping Pirate Mark find his treasure by reading ar words. We ended our Pirate adventure with a fun pirate craftivity and writing activity! Thanks to Abby at The Inspired Apple for a brilliant idea and totally awesome unit!
We also spent time this week working on subtraction word problems. We made up our own story problems using animal crackers. We had a blast with this activity. Each child got to make up a problem and everyone solved it on their paper. And we ate animal crackers. Yummy math, people!
This week we got to make things explode for Mad Science Friday! It just so happened that it was letter S day for our alphabet countdown so we did soda science. We predicted what would happen when we added Mentos candy to sodas. Then we went outside and made soda science go boom! OMG! We had the best time. I want to do this lesson every day. The ‘staches screamed and cheered and oooohhs and aaahhhs were everywhere! Seriously….awesome stuff. We then recorded our results by coloring the soda bottles on our recording sheet. This helped us determine which explosion was bigger! The winner: diet coke! (Click on the picture of the recording sheet to get your free copy!)
This week was also our zoo trip! The zoo trip is the kickoff to our big Growing Grassmere! PBL Project! (Grassmere is the name of our zoo…). We’re going to be “invited” by the zoo to pick a new animal and design the exhibit. Stay tuned.
We had a blast at the zoo. The weather was perfect. The animals were very active. The ‘staches were beyond amazing. I love how excited they get to see every animal. The elephants gave us a great lesson on how animals use their brains and solve problems. There was a piece of a tree trunk in with the elephants and they kept picking it up with their foot and trunk and slamming it down to the ground. At first we thought they were playing but no. Finally a piece of the tree broke off and the elephant ate it!!!! How smart! The ‘staches were so amazed! The coolest exhibit of all has to be the new kangaroo walk about. You walk into the exhibit and the kangaroos are roaming free everywhere!!!!!!! Seriously…I wanna go back just to be in that exhibit again. If they come up to you, you’re allowed to pet them! It could not have been a better day!
Since we are all about zoo animals for a while, we made an animals on parade snack. Celery, cream cheese and animal crackers! Yummy!
And then, because Mr. Greg is the best teacher ever, I surprised the ‘staches with cake batter dip for their animal crackers! YUMMY!!!!!!!!!!! This stuff is beyond amazingly delicious! People, it was so good, they were licking their plates. TRUE STORY! Yeah, we rock like that!
And finally, we had some fun with our alphabet countdown this week! (CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR COUNTDOW!)
W for western day! We even had a real cowboy come sing to us! How cute is my little cowboy twin???
And S for sunglasses! Mr. Greg bought us all mustache sunglasses!!!!! I. LOVE. THESE. GUYS. OMG!