Fun with Frogs!

Happy Spring!!

I am so excited the weather is getting warmer again - I can't wait to get back to the beach and swim in the pool again. 

One of my favorite units to do in the spring is FROGS!  

You can tell Autumn is really excited about Frogs too! She really does love catching and playing with frogs... and worms...and lizards...lol. 

The week we get back from spring break, we are going to be diving into our frog unit.

Here are some books I like to use during this week - some we use to "study" and some we read for fun!
If you download {the preview on TpT}, you can grab this clickable page to find some frog books! I like to keep this page in my files so I remember which books I like to use with the units.

You can click on these pictures now to find the books on Amazon.



So, here is what is included in my frog unit... do I do all of it every year? Goodness no! (said in my best Pete the Cat voice)... each year is different, depending on the abilities of my students. So I like to have a variety at my fingertips to choose from!

The hat craft is super simple, but super cute... as is my model, I think. :)

You can even turn the frog hat into a life cycle craft, by adding the pictures on the band - and it's a circle, so it's perfect!

And one of my favorite things to have the kids do, is to write a nonfiction book of their own!

I like for them to do a directed drawing, trace and color it, cut it out and glue it to the cover. But there is a printable version for the cover, if you prefer that.  There are all kinds of options for what you put inside their nonfiction book!

There's also a cute frog craft!  I like to add him to some writing pages, or you can just make him and hang him for fun!

These are the pages I like to add to the "Class Book" - you can make the class book pages about whatever you want! Favorite frog fact, their opinions on frogs, whatever works for you!

Click the picture below to check it out!

I also have a unit on {Frog and Toad} (the book series) if you would like to tie it to some fiction literature!

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Farm fun, Bookflix, nonfiction, and text features

It seems like Fridays are the only days that I have to blog lately..lol. I guess that's because my Fridays are usually taken. I leave work RIGHT at 3:00 and meet with one or two or a few of my girlfriends for "sprites" after work, then I pick up the girls (or the hubs drops them off on the way to his auction) and we go to the beach.  I must say, it's the combination of seeing my friends for an hour or so and then hitting the beach with my girls is seriously a GREAT end to my week!

Sorry, back to school related.  This week, we used Bookflix. I L.O.V.E Bookflix! I've talked about it before in THIS post. I actually posted a video of myself giving you a "tour" of it - check it out! (it is a paid for site, but I love it! Our media specialist "buys" it for us every year with her  media funds, and I'm very grateful!

So, this week we "read" Click, Clack, Moo and A Visit to a Dairy Farm.

The next day, we discussed how one was fiction and one was non-fiction, and they had to find evidence (common core buzz word!) to prove that it was either one.

Yesterday, our morning meeting reviewed what we've been doing in our morning meeting, and we did some post it note learning (man, I just LOVE post it notes!)

Then, we took their ideas, and turned it into a venn-diagram, and turned that venn-diagram into paragraphs! Say what?!!? PARAGRAPHS? Be still my heart. But I KNOW they can't do it on their own, but the fact that they understood that each paragraph was about something different was just awesome.

We've also been discussing the different parts to non-fiction, like the text features. You can check out THIS post to see how we've been using our reader's notebooks to help us out in our small groups with text features. So then we used that practice and did an informal assessment! I gave them strips of post it notes and they had to label specific things in the magazine.

I was so impressed on how they did!

(see? I love post it notes!)

Today, we added one more bit into our reader's notebooks in the text-features section. Diagrams.  And since we are doing farm themed activities, then I did a cow.  

Let. Me. Tell. You. I am SO impressed with my drawing!! I can NOT draw. And my anchor charts are NOT cute...lol. But I am pretty darn impressed with this. Aren't you!?

I did the cow in front of them, so they could see how I drew it (almost like a directed drawing activity), so theirs came out pretty darn good!

Well, I didn't get through A LOT of my plans from last week, so I'm just moving a lot of it to this week. Please tell me that i'm not the only one that doesn't get through her plans on a weekly basis!

Please.

Make me feel better.

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