THANK-ful Teachers! {Wednesday}

Happy Hump Day!  

{True story.... I HATE when people call Wednesday "Hump Day".  But when in Rome....}

It's time for another round of THANK-ful Teachers with Blog Hoppin'!  

Wednesday:  ACTIVITIES LIKE... We will post about activities that we just love doing in our classrooms!  Show us those WOW lessons!

My Three Favorite Activities to Do Are:

1.  Life Cycles

I absolutely LOVE teaching about life cycles.  The Life Cycle of a Butterfly is my favorite, but The Life Cycle of a Frog is a close second.  I love making huge, interactive bulletin boards to go with each life cycle.  To raise the bar last year, I added higher level questions and information about butterflies on the board.  We discussed those questions as we came to them.  We also added each stage of the life cycle on the board throughout the unit.  It's always a class favorite!    

(I couldn't find my picture, so I stole my coworkers.  Still just as cute!)

2.  Shaving Cream

This is old news, that never gets old!  Shaving Cream is one of my FAVORITE ways to review just about anything!  I've used it for spelling/sight words, math facts, time, shapes, and anything else you can think of.  The best part is, when you are finished, you have clean desks and happy kids!

3.  Science

I love teaching Science!  It's always the kiddos' favorite, too.  We are so lucky, because our school district provides all the materials for awesome science experiments and lessons.  Our first unit this year was on the weather.  

So we made rain:

and tornadoes! 

0

More Butterflies

This week we painted butterflies for our life cycle books/bulletin board display.

The final product

Then we went to the park to set them free.  Unfortunately we live in the coldest part of the world, I think, so I'm pretty sure they died.  {don't tell the kids}  Apparently they only live for about 2 weeks, so they didn't really have a chance.  :(  But it was still fun, and the kids loved it!  We walked to the park and had our earth day lunch.  The kids bring a lunch that is only reusable/recyclable lunches.  We recycle EVERYTHING and leave no garbage.  It's a lot of fun and my favorite earth day activity! 

 We didn't stay long.  It was WAY too cold.

Three of our beautiful butterflies.  I wish I would have taken a picture with their wings open, but I'll take what I can get.  :)  We have a few more activities this week, and then we'll be finished. 

1

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.  :) 

3