Busy Busy April

Hi Y'all! It's been a while since my last post and boy have we been busy. I woke up Tuesday morning (Field Trip Day) 

100% sick  

I seriously didn't think I was going to make it. After lots and lots of medicine, we went on a field trip to the public library and Fire Station. 

The kids loved the trip and I surprisingly pulled through. I took off the next day and found out I had an easy to cure case of strep throat, nothing a Z-Pack couldn't cure. 

After that I was off to Biloxi, Mississippi for a long awaited family gambling trip for my grandma's birthday (she's quiet the slot machine junkie). It was my first time gambling and was SUPER fun! I even won $200 on a slot machine!

My cousins live about 20 minutes away so we were able to stay with them and got to wake up and see the sweet babies open their Easter Egg baskets. Those precious angels! 

As fun as this was, today was my day back to reality. Having 3 days of sub plans can be stressful but luckily I had my Intern there for her full week and she took over a lot of the teaching. It was definitely helpful to have two hands on deck.

So to catch you up on what we've been doing. We started to learn about the Human Body, always a fun topic and easily grabs my kids' attention. We read the text Body Works from the Flying Start Series and pulled in additional information from two advanced books I have (and no longer let them touch because multiple organs/parts have been ripped or torn out of the book). 

My intern created this AWESOME flip book to hold and organize the information the students' learn on each part of the body we explored.

We typically learned an organ a day and would discuss and reflect on our findings using turn and talk. They read the small summary of the organ then matched it with the body part display and wrote a fact about what they learned on the back. They turned out nice and my kids really seemed to enjoy them!

I was gone the week before Easter, but wanted my kids to still feel like they were able to do festive activities without me so I created a few centers that were "Easter" themed. We worked on compound words and old spelling patterns using plastic eggs. They wrote their words on this "Egg-Celent" recording sheet I created. 



We finished the "Spring Thinking Maps" I talked about in my last post using the text from Houghton Mifflin, Let's Go to The Moon. As you can see they turned out SUPER cute and look great hanging around the class! :)

We've been doing a lot of math review before our big ITBS test in two weeks. Here is a double digit addition center I introduced to my kids to help reinforce what we've learned about place value. You can get it for free here. 

We recently started learning about measurement and are about to move on over to time. I created three measurement centers to help reinforce my student's concept of non-standard measurement. It went over well and definitely helped them better conceptualize sizes. After getting the hang of it we measured our feet, hands, and the carpet! Some of them could even guess the correct size of paper clips of other student's hands based on the size of their own hand. Pick these up for free here!