Five For Friday - only 8 more Fridays!!

Sea Life - Updated!

We are really getting into our Sea Life unit. We have had so many great discussions about all the sea life that we are having to extend our unit a few more days. This week we have been working on fiction verses non-fiction, fact and opinion, and informative writing with our sea life critters. I found a great resource from Deanna Jump (here) and have modified and mixed and matched it with some other ideas.

Eric Carle Inspired Tissue Paper Seahorse

We compared Eric Carle's fiction book, Mr. Seahorse, to Seahorses by Sylvia James - a nonfiction book. They were in awe that the fiction book told us facts about the seahorse and other fish just like the nonfiction book. We also watched a clip from the show "Kenny the Shark" and they realized that cartoons teach us things too. (Orcas eat sharks.) 

Updated Ocean Posters: We just have to add jellyfish and we will be done. I have loved teaching this unit and am kind of sad to see it end!

  Sea Stars with Grits for the Suckers

(forgive the jeans and FLIP FLOPS!!! So glad the weather is warmer!) 

Orca Whales & Sharks

 Here are the whales and sharks we made from Deanna Jumps' unit - Ocean Animals. We also made a Popplet about sharks and a board in Discovery Education (see #4) for whales after filling in a "fact map" from the Ocean Animals unit (picture below). We will make shark boards today. 

 Shark Popplet

Orca Whale Fact Writing Map

Orca Boards

Scrawlar

Have you heard of Scrawlar? I had not until someone in my DEN STAR group on Edmodo told us about it. This WEB (cloud) BASED (remember we cannot have apps) processor works as a white board and word processor on an iPad. As a teacher you simply set up an account, add your students name and password and then give the kids your login code. We used this during whole group reading to practice writing our cvc words and our sight words. If you use iPads in your room, I highly recommend checking out Scrawlar!

iPad Update: Board Builder by Discovery Education
It is official, we are hooked on building boards from DE! Tuesday we had some super sweet 3rd graders from Mrs. Peturis' class come help show us how to use board builder (me included). We now have made a board every afternoon - we just can't get enough!!

She was extremely proud!

Another new piece of furniture!!!

After getting the new sectional sofa, there was a lot more space in front of my "cross wall" so I went in search of a sofa table. Last weekend the Hubby and I went looking at all the great antique stores down HWY 59. We ended up at one of favorite stores, Alice in Wonderland Antiques (Facebook) and found an beautiful repurposed table. It is so unique! 

At Christmas I also found this amazing WWII trunk! I love it and just had to snap a picture this morning while I was taking pictures of the table!