Dinosaurs... ROAR!!

Long time no post, right? Well if you're like me, it's very hard to stretch yourself in different directions. With my masters going on right now and teaching, things have been busy. I have also been crafting, which is a breath of fresh air after masters work and teaching work is over. I still love blogging my classroom happenings, but I always seem to make it my last priority. Today I am sharing with you what we have been doing the past week.

We started our unit on dinosaurs a couple of weeks ago and we have been going strong. Here are just a few things that we have been doing.

1. Fossil Dig

The students used cookies as rocks to dig out fossils.

2. Paleontologist

Then we used Diana Jump's dinosaur file to create paleontologists. Inside they wrote directions on how to dig for fossils.

3. Tyrannosaurus Rex

We used Diana Jump's file again to write about trex and complete an activity.

4. Triceratops

This activity turned out super cute. I wanted my students to create a triceratops, but I hadn't made a template for them. I went ahead and drew a template on the board and my students created their own. They turned out super cute and they all had their own personalities.

One of my favorites!!

5. Herbivores vs. Carnivores

A fun way to compare and contrast herbivores and carnivores.

I am linking up over at...

Update

It's been a while since I've last posted so let me just recap what has been going on in pictures.

Leapin' Leprachauns

Happy Sunday! Only one more week until Spring Break!! I am so excited. This upcoming week is going to be a long one. Not only do I have morning and afternoon duty all week, it is also conference week. Which also means there are two half days. How am I going to get it all in!! I don't want the craziness to allow me to loose my fun. To add a little color and interest this week I decided to log into my Pinterest account, which you can find HERE and complete some with my students this week.

Pin #1

Source

 This activity is from A Cupcake for the Teacher. I am super excited to use this with my kids because I will be putting my own little spin on it. What is it you may ask? Well you'll just have to stop by my blog on Friday to find out what it is. :-) 

 

Pin #2

Source 

When I saw this cute little pot of gold on Pinterest I knew I had to do it myself. Unfortunately, I went to purchase the file for this activity and it did not include the template for the pot of gold. Either way, it's a cute idea and the file did include a few centers that I may use this week. I will have to make a template for this on my own though.

 

Don't forget to link up over at...

  



Spring Fever

To say that my class has spring fever is an understatement. We had district benchmarks this week and we still have another long week of conferences to go until spring break. We are holding on though!! To make this week a little fun since it's been so stressful, I made sure to add in a lot of craftivities, my, I mean my students' favorite!!

1. Contractions
In order to get ready for our district benchmark we did a lot of review. One of the things that we reviewed was contractions.

We used these little contraction crocodiles from Cara Carrol's Crazy for Contractions file.

We also played a cute little contraction memory game that I found over at Learning in Wonderland and you can it for free here from Caitlyn Taylor.

2. Dental Health

I'm cheating a little. I actually did these last week, but I wasn't able to share this cute little dental health craftivity.

I also found this over at Learning in Wonderland and the best part is that it is FREE! My students need to be able to write directions. What's better then starting with something they do every day, brushing their teeth!

3. St. Patrick's Day

I posted earlier this week that we were celebrating St. Patrick's Day a little early since we will be on spring break. I used, yet another FREEBIE!! This time it is from The Teacher Wife.

 These two are some of my favorite. The top one is Tony Stark. He didn't quite understand that he was to write someone in his life that is special to him. He was extremely passionate about Tony Stark (Iron Man) that I let him have his fun. The second one is about me, but I love that she added that I make her laugh so much. I'm glad my students have as much fun as I do!!

4. Measurement

I also posted earlier this week that I was planning on doing a measurement activity that i found on Pinterest.

 5. Total Randomness

Today was a crazy crazy day, everything that could happen, did. Here is just a list of things that went on today...

• dropped my wallet on the ground (which holds my iphone as well oh yeah, it was raining too)
• forgot my umbrella
• forgot my classroom key, therefore I was locked out of my room all day and I had to rely on my BFF-teacher-neighbor to let us in through the connecting door
• got a new student (Not so annoying, but it was another boy. I have 6 girls and 15 boys!!)
• a kid threw up at the end of the day and it even got on our new carpet :-(
• rainy day today so the kids came in 10 minutes early while I was still prepping 
• clear day and then down pour while walking to the buses

I'm sure more things happened, but that's all I'm going to write about. Despite everything that happened today, I'm surprisingly in a good mood. I'm off to enjoy, the now, sunny day. :-)

Pinspired

I made it a personal goal to start using some of my Pinterest pins. There are so many great ideas just sitting on my Pinterest boards and that is all that they are doing... sitting. When I saw that Mrs. Sheehan over at Learning in Wonderland started a weekly link up of activities that you want to accomplish that you have pinned, I knew this was for me. I have been using pins since the beginning of the year, but I want to make more of an effort to get things accomplished. This week I plan on using two pins in particular.

Pin #1

Source

St. Patrick's Day is just around the corner and unfortunately we are on Spring Break on the actual day. Come to think of it, I have never taught on St. Patrick's Day in my whole teaching career. Since we are not at school on the day, we are celebrating early.

 

Pin #2

 

Source

We have been working on measurement to the nearest inch and half inch. When I saw this on Pinterest, I knew my kids would have fun with it. The students get one sheet of construction paper and they are to measure each link. Whoever has the longest chain, wins!!

 

Check back on Friday to see how all of these activities went. Do you have any Pinteresting ideas? If so, make sure to link over at...

 

 

If you are interested in seeing more of my pins, you can always follow me on Pinterest by clicking HERE.



 

Anti-Bullying Day

Today was anti-bullying day at our school. I'm not sure if it's a national day, but today all our classrooms taught a bullying lesson. Our second grade team decided on this lesson to teach. At first I didn't think my kids were understanding it. I had them draw a picture of themselves. While they were drawing I wanted them to look at their picture and think of all the good things about themselves. What were they proud of. Then we sat on the floor a traded pictures. After trading we talked about how bullies treat people. I had each student say things that bullies tell others to their paper person. They crumppled the paper up. Then I had them apologize to the paper person while uncrinkling it.

Then I had them give the paper person back to the original creator. I asked them if their paper looked the same or different. They all said that it was different. We all went into a discussion on how bullying will affect you and even if someone says they're sorry, we will never forget how it felt. I had them picture a crumppled up heart.

Finally we had parter time. This is when it really hit home. My students were able to talk about bullying and how it has affected them personally. Some of my kids were getting teary eyed and I realized that I should have explicitly taught about bullying earlier on in the year.

It's never too late to talk about bullying and it is something that can be a year long discussion. I'm just glad that I had this lesson and chance to talk about an issue that our students are dealing with everyday. It makes them realize that we understand what they are going through and that we are here to help them.

 

What do you do in your own classrooms to help stop bullying? Please feel free to leave a comment or link to some activities that you find helpful.





Friday Recap on Sunday

I have had a busy week, to say the least. I figured the best way to recap is to participate in

Randomness #1

Valentine's Day was on Thursday. It was a lot of fun. I loved that it was on an early release day and the following day (Friday) there was no school for the students. Teachers had an inservice day. I want to share some of our pictures from our mustache party.

 I used A Cupcake For the Teacher's Valentine's Day file to write a conversation heart story. My students LOVED it and some of their stories were amazing. Here is my favorite.

 While my students were passing out their cards, we played some fun games. I make it into a rotation so every 10 minutes the students rotated to a new station. One of the stations was passing out their cards. Another was this fun little pin the mustache on a man game.

 

 I also made a few props for our version on a photo booth. I brought in my new Canon t4i. My students felt like celebrities.

Then came the cupcakes. These cupcakes deserved 3 pictures. They were the prettiest cupcakes I have EVER seen in my life and they tasted amazing. I saved some of the velum pieces for scrapbooking.

Randomness #2

I got a shout out of A Cupcake For the Teacher's blog. She used my little owl bags. I was so excited when I saw her blog post!!

Randomness #3

I bought a new car! Here's my quick little car story. Ever since I was in high school I always wanted a Black Toyota Corolla S. I had a For Thunderbird at the time so a Corolla was definitely an upgrade. During college my husband and I looked around the first dealership we went to and I spotted a Corolla. Now this was a Subaru dealership so it was the only Corolla on the lot. Of course I needed it. I was a 2006 Corolla LE. It was two years old and I loved it. We had that car for about 3-4 years until 10 months ago when we thought it was time for a bigger car because we needed more storage space. We got the Mazda 5. We loved it, but we wanted to get a car that was good on gas mileage. We were originally going to get a Prius, but when I saw the new 2013 Corolla S, I knew I had to have it. So now I do. We are lacking storage again, but I've never been so happy about purchasing a car. Now we will wait 5 years to get a second car, which will have storage. This Corolla will be mine FOREVER!!

Randomness #4

I went shopping for some crafty stuff and a few things for my classroom. I bought an extra blue trash can for one of my tables, Mr. Popper's Penguins DVD, and some clear pebbles for reading that I saw either on Pinterest or one of the teaching blogs.

With all of my crafty shopping I have to start crafting. So here is a layout that I worked on in my Smashbook the other day. If you want to visit my crafting blog, you can click HERE.

So that's about it for my week and weekend. I am so glad that tomorrow is President's Day and I have another day off. This weekend went by so fast. Only a few more weeks until Spring Break though, how exciting!!