Five For Friday April 17 (on a Saturday)

While I have only been blogging for a short time, I really feel like it has already made me a better, more thoughtful, and reflective teacher.  Last night I was excited to write this post about our week, got started, and then fell asleep.  Sorry for the delay!

This week started off with a bang when we found out that Go Noodle had POP SEE KO 2.0!  We were in L-O-V-E!!  I use Whole Brain Teaching for management in my classroom and the reward for the kids "winning" the scoreboard is extra Go Noodle videos.  I use Go Noodle throughout the day for brain breaks, but it is also great motivator as an end of the day reward.  If you don't use Go Noodle yet, you must go try it out!  You won't regret it.  

This week we learned all about butterflies.  We started off the week learning about symmetry by a symmetrical butterfly art project.  We folded our papers like a hamburger and painted one side.  Then we folded it over, pushed on our papers, and when we opened them up the magic happened.  Friends, a little teacher confession: if you are going to do this art project, make sure you add blobs of paint.  I painted mine as a model, opened it up and voilà... nothing much happened.  Oops! 

The kids made their own head and antenna.  I love how they turned out!

 We read our non-fiction article about the butterfly life cycle. 

Then, we sequenced the life cycle and added the pictures to our butterfly's wings.  

 One thing I am really trying to hit hard before the end of the year is retelling.  It is so hard to break a book down to its most important parts, summarize it, and share it without extraneous information.  Especially when it is an epic story such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar.   We focused on beginning, middle, and end with this story so I used the anchor chart below.  I like to use Fairy Tales as a structure for retelling and use Goldilocks for beginning, middle, and end.  Friends, I love Fairy Tales.  I love the structure, the easy reading comprehension, and they are so motivating.  But I digress.

We decided as a group what parts of the story fit best into the beginning, middle, and end and then together we summarized the story.  The next day, we closed our eyes and visualized each part.  After visualizing each part, we stopped and drew/wrote (and labeled!) our visualizations.  Here are some examples of my students' work.

Guess what was delivered at 2pm on Friday?! Caterpillars!!!!!!  We had to do a "silent scream" because well, there was no better way to react to these teeny tiny caterpillars or end our week ;)

Have a great weekend!