Awesome-sauce Valentines

Well another week on the roller coaster of winter days in NEPA!

Oh yes ... 2 hour delays and snow days galore.

Nevertheless we fit in a lotta hands on learning this week. 

With all of the missed school and short weeks lately my team decided to take a break from moving on and focused this week on a review of all topics from our unit. 

Being snowed in has given me many opportunities to do a little research. 

Pinterest is my best friend and sincerely helps me look at learning concepts in a new light with a creative twist for sure. I loved this activity with contractions and my students were a huge fan. 

Anchor charts are a great way to build student schema and prepare their little brains for learning. We talked through this anchor chart describing contractions and how to make or decode contractions in text. 

We pushed words together and students "operated" on words to turn them into contractions. 

I purchased doctors masks and bandaids from the dollar store. 

Students each got their own masks and successfully conducted "surgery" on 10 words. 

Some needed to "reopen" their patients but most had a 100% success rate. 

We truly had a ton of fun and the excitement on their faces was priceless. 

We posted our best "patients" on the anchor chart.

Our reading topics this week included:

Describing Characters

Compare and Contrast

Main Idea

I used the story "Somebody Loves you Mr. Hatch"by Eileen Spinelli

Super cute story about a man who runs through a plethora of emotions and feelings.

This man goes through his normal day to day routines never straying from the plan living an ordinary life. Unexpectedly he receives a package in the mail that changes his actions toward others. It is a great story and shows that even the smallest act can make someone's day. 

After the story we talked about the elements of the story and the main idea.

Students were then each responsible for one heart and describing Mr. Hatch. I dismissed students to their seat to write their character trait as they came up with them. We were able to each come up with something different and this really challenges students to rack their brains for new adjectives. 

I love the Cara Carroll and the firstgradeparade!!! 

For the rest of the week I used her Splat and Valentine's day math and literacy activities.

Love, Splat is an all time favorite and I used this story to compare characters.

Spike and Splat are two completely opposite cats who are in love with Kitten. 

My kiddos found this story super entertaining and loved working through Cara's math and literacy centers at the end of the week. I am all about Friday Fun centers ... it was a great way to review both math and literacy topics from the week in a fun and interactive way. They loved seeing splat again!

You can find Cara's activities here!

To top of the week we read "Queen of Hearts" by Mary Engelbreit

Another great read aloud about a little girl who spends all of her time working on her Valentine's day box and forget to write her Valentines. She gives meaningful items to all of her classmates and it turns out to be the best Valentine because it was from the heart.

This story was a great way to talk about main idea and prepare our Valentine boxes for our classroom exchange. Check em out ... 

I gave out all sorts of hearts and students went to town. 

They did a great job creating their own Valentine People!

Many schools today have Health and Wellness policies that they follow strictly. 

Luckily we do not but I was tired of the same old holiday parties and was super excited for a little change in this holiday celebration. 

This year we had a Parfait Party!

Yes Parfaits

Granted most of my students did not know what a parfait was but they loved them!!!!

The menu was complete and full of yogurt, granola, fruit, mini muffins, and of course cupcakes.

I am loving our celebrations this year and how nutritious they are becoming. 

I try to also come up with new gifts each year and of course pinterest came to the rescue. 

I loved these little apple sauce pouches and my kids loved them!

I hope you all had a wonderful Valentines Day celebration!

Now onto President's Day learning and 100th day of school celebrations.