Plants, Plants, Baby

4th grade seems to really step up the Plant Unit game and gets deeper into vascular/nonvascular, plant parts, and photosynthesis. Yikes! Luckily, I had these activities on hand to help me break it down for the kiddos.

5 days of lesson plans with all materials, objectives, and steps laid out and ready for me! 

This slideshow laid out everything simply for everyone to understand...plus it comes with a handout for students to fill out notes. 

Each day ends with an interactive notebook activity so they could practice what we learned about.

Anchor charts also helped us organize the differences in vascular and nonvascular plants...NEW vocabulary for 4th graders!!

We're also able to do a fun and easy science lab to see how vascular plants use stems to "drink" water...thank you blue food coloring!

We'll get to review with a Magic School Bus viewing that has comprehension questions before we take the unit test to wrap everything up.

Whew!! It's a lot to pack into one unit but we'll be plant experts by the end of it! See more of this unit by clicking HERE!

Shapin' Up!

It's been a while since the last blog because of this:

Aaahhhhhhhh. Such a beauty. Nothin' like it. :) Football is so big around here, even the sweeties get into it on the playground.

love it. 

We briefly touched on word problems for a week and discussed our strategies for solving them. As always, Blair Turner's Interactive Notebook had just the perfect flipchart to put in our math journals to help us!

We also used the math journals to get a good grip on what is a "ten". This review will come in handy later!

The kiddos even got to make their own facts to sort into the pockets. Some little ones got super creative and really tried to stretch their math knowledge! Even though some of the number were waaaayyyy to big for the point of the activity, I let it slide since it was a blank card and I loved seeing the creativity. :)

We eventually moved on to SHAPES! We looked at 2-D and 3-D shapes, their properties, and how we can sort them.
We played a great game called "Ways to Fill Patterns" which was a hit in math workshop!

We also looked at shapes to really break down what makes them special from other shapes. 

Once again, from Blair Turner

At the end of the week, we focused on rectangles, rows, and columns. Friday was a great day to break out the geoboards! 

Reading was a review week, so hopefully I'll have more to share as we start a new unit this week. :) This post was short and sweet because the hubby is grilling burgers and it smells DELICIOUS, so I'll let all the pictures do the talking for our bunch.

Oh, and my October Morning Work is up and ready in my TPT store today! Go ahead and grab it for some great practice this month!

A peek into my classroom

Is it possible for teachers to not think about school during the summer??? I've been popping in our building since my floors have been waxed and shiny (My floor looks brand new! Considering what it went through this past year, it's amazing...really).

Last year, I was the new teacher on the block and didn't have a CLUE what to do with an empty classroom. Actually, it wasn't completely empty. The first time I saw my room it looked like this:

woah. 

Pretty soon, it was all cleaned out and I had nothing. And when I say nothing, I mean nothing. I scraped together enough materials in one month to call this thing a classroom and it looked like this:

Still a bit empty, but ready for some 2nd grade sweeties. So many people donated time and resources to help me start my first year. I am forever thankful!

At the end of the school year, I knew I wanted to change some things around for my next batch of sweeties. I've collected a bit more classroom goodies over the year, and I've filled in my room a little! I'm waiting to put names on some stuff everything until right before our Meet and Greet on August 5th. It will change several times until about the 2nd week of school! I've still got a bit more to put up, but here it is!

Now, it just needs my new 17 little sweeties to make it complete! 

Oh, and see that thing pulled up on my computer screen? A teacher-friend showed me an amazing interactive math notebook from Blair Turner and I think I'm going to be in LOVE with math journaling this year! Her 2nd Grade Common Core Math Interactive Notebook has "I Can" statements and vocabulary words for each standard which is simply fantastic. I spent my afternoon printing all the pages (there are quite a bit). They are ready to be sorted with tabs labeled by standards-not at all Type A, right?!