Putt Putt Night

We had a great turn out at our school's first annual Putt Putt Night.  It was by far my favorite PTO activity of all time.  Every teacher helped make some pretty impressive holes.  I tried to take a picture of most of them.  I forgot a few. 

Funny Frogs

This was my class.  Complete with "pools" and a giant frog to hit the ball through its legs.

3... 2... 1... Lift Golf!

This was the winner of Most Creative and Overall Favorite.  It was even cooler in real life - it was dark with flashing lights. 

The Puzzler

Dangerous Dinosaurs

Junk Yard

Garfield Land

Maze

Windmill

This was the winner for Most Challenging. 

Chutes, Curves, and Rocks.  Oh My!

Zoo

Truck Land

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LARGE love note

Remember the love notes book?  Well, a couple days after I introduced the binder, Eli brought me in this awesome picture to put in the book. 

Doesn't quite fit, though. ;)

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Happy Easters

{can you tell I'm on spring break?!} 

Last week was so crazy, I didn't get as many Easter activities finished as I wanted to.  We'll have to catch up a bit tomorrow.  Here's a bit of our Easter fun. 

Painting Easter Eggs

Every hour or so, I picked a well-behaved child to wear these bunny ears.  It worked amazingly.  :)

Simple Graph Art Mystery Picture

We Egged our Principal.

This idea came from Lesson Plan SOS

Each child wrote a letter to our principal using "egg" words {egg-cellent, egg-cited}.  We put them in the eggs, decorated, and left some treats.  The kids LOVED it!  I made my own sign and writing paper. 

You've Been Egged

Writing Paper

Chicks and Rabbits Graphing

I searched everywhere for Bunny Mallows to use with this activity.  I went to four different stores and couldn't find them anywhere.  I did, however, find Chicks and Rabbits.  So I made my own graphing sheet to use with it.  Good times. 

Chicks and Rabbits

Tomorrow we will finish up these adorable Easter Bunny's and writing activity.  Then we will officially be done with Easter and moving on to Earth Day.  :)

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Life Cycle of a Butterfly

Now that I have the frog life cycle out of the way, I can start posting about our butterflies!  This is my absolute favorite thing to teach in all of the world.  Ha.  For the past six years, I've always bought caterpillars from Insect Lore and we've watched them turn into butterflies.  Unlike the frogs, these NEVER died.  This year was close, though.  I put the container of caterpillars on our document camera to get a closer look.  I accidentally left it on all night long, and it over heated, filling the container with condensation.  I was worried, but luckily all five caterpillars survived!  Here are some of the products I bought to use with this unit.  All from Insect Lore {can you tell I love LOVE this store?}. 

Just like the frogs, this book has tons of fun activities to do with caterpillars/butterflies.  I do a lot from it.  And just like the frog pond, it has the idea for a butterfly garden to display to life cycle stages.  We've only done the first three stages... we'll do butterflies sometime this week.  But here's our wall so far. 

not so good cell phone pic

 rice

 pipe cleaner, marker for the legs and antennae

yarn wrapped around a pipe cleaner

On Thursday, our first butterfly hatched.  The other looked like it was so close, so I put it under the document camera for us to watch.  I left it like that ALL DAY, but of course, at the end of the day when it stopped working, the butterfly finally decided to hatch.  They still got to watch it as I held up the net for everyone to see, but not as up-close and personal as I had hoped.  I took this picture as we were waiting for it to hatch.  I thought it looked really neat.  Two chrysalis' are on the left, the first hatched butterfly is on the right. 

Man, technology these days is amazing! 

More butterfly activities coming soon.  :) 

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Life Cycle of a Frog

I saw the best idea for the life cycle of a frog on You Can Make The Sunshine Anytime, which made me remember to post about what we did at the beginning of the year to learn about frogs.  I have a frog theme in my classroom, so I thought it would be fun to buy two tadpoles and have them grow into frogs.  One of them died, so then I bought one more tadpole with legs.  Then they died, too.  I was so mad.  I contacted the company I bought them from to find out why the first one died.  She suggested to clean the tank more often (I was already doing it 2-3 times a week) and to use bottle water to fill it with.  Yeah right, they're tadpoles for crying' out loud.  So sadly, we didn't get to watch them grow into frogs.  Next year, I'll do Mrs. Matsuda's activity.  So cute.  :)  We did have fun with some other activities.  First of all, I LOVE this book from Insect Lore. 

It has so many fun activities to do across the curriculum with frogs.  It also had the idea for a huge bulletin board and a book about the life cycle.  I turned our board in the hall into a lake/land area for the frogs.  Each child also got a book with a page for each stage.  Every week we learned more about each stage, and then made a representation of each stage and put one in the hall and one in their books.  I also printed out facts for them to put in their books.  If that doesn't make sense, maybe these pictures will help.  :) 

It was a lot of fun.  I really love teaching about life cycles.  But we sure do miss these little guys...

This is snowflake doing an interpretive dance to a glee song.  ha.  :) 

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