Five for Friday {First Week Back}

Hi Friends! How are ya? Did you have a great first week back at school? My kiddos and I had a busy week of review and catch up! We were all a hot.sick.mess during the weeks leading up to Christmas…..so we had to use our first week back to review.review.review and CATCH UP! And by golly, I think we’ve done it!

I’m linking up with Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching to share our faves from this past week.

We skip counted through the week in math! Notice the typo on the 5’s chart? Ugh! Not sure what we were thinking…thank goodness for my eagle-eyed team mate! It’s all fixed scribbled over to say in instead of is now. When you teach syllabication in the morning, and skip counting in the afternoon…..BEWARE….you may end up with big words on your math anchor chart! =)

Simply [rote] skip counting is of days past. Now, our standards call for skip counting sets of objects….the day we worked on counting by 5’s we each traced our hands and lined them up across the carpet to count sets of 5 little fingers! Kiddos loved how long the line was and were utterly amazed when they discovered how many fingers there are in our classroom! After we counted them, 3 students worked together to label each of the hands in order beginning with 5 before I hung them up to use as a reference.

This week, Smart Art began on Thursday. What we were going to do, would take some time….so it just couldn’t wait all the way until Friday.

I absolutely LOVE using the book The Apple Pie Tree by Zoe Hall to teach how the changing seasons effect plants. After reading it and discussing what happened to the apple pie tree during each season, we worked to illustrate what we had learned. As much as I love sharing an awesome book, I love tying in art even more…

On Thursday we worked to cut, glue, and draw details to illustrate winter and spring. On Friday, we flipped our little foldable over to illustrate summer and autumn.

The wonkiness of kids’ work adds character. No patterns were provided. I like seeing their personalities shine through their work. Each kiddo started with a blank sheet of paper and a model projected on the whiteboard as a guide to get started. Though we were all illustrating the seasons, each and every tree, leaf, and apple are unique because they were given creative control of the work they’d produce. Lots of happy smiles were seen among the mess of clips and snips of paper all over the room!

Wanna peek inside? After giving summer and autumn a little time to dry, we opened them up to prep for next week. One of our performance assessments is to observe and record the weather over the course of a week. Last week….seasons. Next week….weather. We’ll use our little foldable to record the weather and relative temperature each morning. On Thursday, during our normal science lesson, we’ll read Gail Gibbons’ Weather Words and illustrate the vocabulary. Lastly, students will illustrate their favorite type of weather!

Creating a display type foldable added a little novelty to our work. Foldables shouldn’t have to always be flat! I love using them, BUT I don’t want my kiddos to get bored with them by continuously using the same kind all the time. They watched me prep this one for them and absolutely couldn’t wait to get their hands on it!

Will your little meteorologists be making observations about the weather soon? Click HERE to grab the mini-pages we’ll be using. Check out some of the books and resources we’ll be using below!




Happy weather watching!