Recap of Storms and Peek at Frogs {freebie too!}

It’s SPRING!!!!!  We know what that means……….s.u.m.m.e.r is on the way!  Tell me that I am not the only one dreaming of that?! ha!  This past week we studied storms!  It was a lot of fun and the kids learned so much!  You can see above the books we paired for the week…all of them are equally fun and engaging!  We also read a story called, A Water Drop’s Journey.  I will explain more about that one later.  Here are my plans from last week…

Here is our prior knowledge and our new knowledge!  This week I finally remembered to use alternate colors to show their new and previous learning!

The kids really picked up on the importance of storms and that even though storms can be scary at times, they are not always so bad!

This week’s vocabulary words…they were a little more abstract, but we worked hard!

Can, have, are…

This week we also worked on a mini service learning project!  We learned all about keep our streams clean and safe for our drinking water.  We did a little experiment to show the effect trash has on our water.  I filled up this jar with clean water and the kids then picked up trash from around the school and we placed it in the jar.  Well, I unfortunately on Friday afternoon I dumped it out and as I was…I thought to myself I should have taken a picture, but you’d probably be happy that I didn’t…..it was DISGUSTING!  
The kids were so amazed at how dirty and icky the water got…they decided they would not want to drink that water!  We also made posters to hang up in the school.  We wanted to teach our friends the importance of cleaning up trash!

We then took it one step further by walking over to the park and picking up trash there too!  We actually collected more trash on the short walk to the park, than the actual park…I guess that is a good thing though?

Our community wasterwater representative also came and spoke to the kids about the importance of keeping our streams clean.  He showed the kids pictures of streams that had been cleaned up…the kids were astonished!

In writing this week we wrote opinion stories on storms, factual stories, and this connect it writing!  For this writing the students connected our nonfiction and fiction texts!

In math we continued with addition!  This past week I wanted to really work on the fluency aspect of addition since we had worked on combining sets for a couple of weeks prior!  The kids really love playing “Around the World”….yeah old school 😉  However, with that game you have to patiently wait for your turn and then BAM your turn is over. So, I made these addition cards for the kids to use with their partners.  The first partner would be the teacher and state the addition problems…the second partner would answer the problems.  I would then say my Whole Brain Teaching cue, “UH OH, SWITCH!” The students would then switch roles….they loved it!

We also looked at missing addends with model drawing!  We learned to draw circles for the total amount that we know.  We then crossed out the one part we already knew….then we could see our missing addend.  I also encouraged the students to check their work!  You know for the kiddo that would write 10 as their answer….well does 10 and 4 make 6?

Alright, you can download my plans for next week below!  Here is a snapshot of our week….

It’s frog week!!! woooohooo!

Download the plans below…