Cherry Blossoms Say Spring

I'm off to Washington, DC to visit my college roommates, do some exploring, and see the Cherry Blossom Parade and Festival (Saturday, April 14 from 10:00am-12:30pm). The trees were donated to the US by Japan as a symbol of friendship, but their blooming signifies spring. I found these great books to read to my students to tell them about what I did before they do their "What I Did on Spring Break" writing when we get back.

Cherry Blossoms Say Spring

The Cherry Blossom Festival

Eliza's Cherry Trees

Here's a little info on the 2012 parade:

Honorary Marshals include singer and actress Marie Osmond; Olympians Benita Fitzgerald Mosley and Kristi Yamaguchi; astronaut Buzz Aldrin; Shintaro Ishihara, Governor of Tokyo; and Ichiro Fujisaki,Ambassador of Japan to the United States. The parade is co-hosted by ABC’s Katie Couric with special correspondent Alex Trebek of Jeopardy and ABC7’s Alison Starling and Leon Harris. Standing room along the Parade route is free and open to the public. 

If you can't attend, but would like to contribute to the beautification of Washington D.C. or buy a cherry blossom tree for your own home, check out the Arbor Day Foundation website.

Our Class is Going Green!

I just loved this book to kick off our Earth Day campaign here at school.

Check out the read aloud here.

Besides growing a cherry blossom tree, 

we created upcycled materials to celebrate reading A Mr. Rubbish Mood, a excerpt from a book called Judy Moody Saves the World! It teaches kids about materials that can be recycled. 

We watch this Brain Pop Jr. video to teach students to reduce, reuse, and recycle.

For younger kids, this song about cleaning up trash is so fun!

Check out more STEM / science posts:

http://alysiabattista.blogspot.com/search/label/science

The Bee Tree

A few days ago we read The Bee Tree in preparation for our Patricia Polacco author visit. We created bees and a tree (out of reclaimed brown paper bags) to decorate our display case. It will be the first thing she sees when she enters our school!

My favorite quote from the book is, "There is such sweetness inside of that book too! Such things...adventure, knowledge, and wisdom. But these things do not come easily. You have to pursue them. Just like we ran after the bees to find their tree, so you must also chase these things through the pages of a book!"

Can you see the "flying" bees? I used clear lanyard to hang them since I couldn't find my fishing wire! I was inspired to make a bee hive by wrapping yarn around an old, plastic mayo jar from the cafeteria. 

We also made paper Pysanky eggs to celebrate Rechenka's Eggs and Chicken Sunday. Students also created bunting flags that illustrated their favorite Polacco book. We're working on a "Keeping Quilt" next!

We also did some fun activities that can be found below, including this simile sheet...

and this definition sheet.

We also used these writing paper sheets.

Check out these other bee-related resources!

http://users.manchester.edu/Student/KRHarvey/BeeTree/index.htm

http://www.homeschoolshare.com/resourcesbee_tree.php

http://www.patriciapolacco.com/fun/quizes/beetree.html

Rechenka's Eggs

In the spirit of spring, we read Rechenka's Eggs by Patricia Polacco. Most of my students do not celebrate Easter, so we looked at it from an art / author's purpose view.

Babushka is an artist who enjoys painting eggs. One day she comes across a goose that has been shot by a hunter. As she nurses it to health, it begins to lay eggs. The goose, Rechenka, accidentally knocks over a basket of Babushka's carefully painted eggs...right before the Easter Festival in Moskva. Each night until the festival, the goose begins to lay decorative eggs. Babushka says goodbye and thank you to Rechenka as she leaves for the festival, knowing that she is healthy and will rejoin to her flock. After Babushka returns home, she finds a decorative egg in her basket. It begins to shake and make noise. A baby goose hatches and keeps Babushka company for the rest of her life.

My students think that Patricia's purpose was to explain why we celebrate Easter with decorative eggs in baskets! I guess we will have to ask her in a few weeks!

Here are the eggs we made. First we drew a design on dry erase boards. Next, we drew the designs on the eggs using pencils. Then we used Sharpie markers to color in the designs. They're obviously more colorful than Pysanky eggs, but it was certainly easier than painting or dying them!

  Patricia on Reading Rainbow

Scholastic Lesson Plan

Ms. Jacoby's site with tons of activities

The Journey: Stories of Migration

This week's book, The Journey: Stories of Migration, compares migration of locusts and whales. While the excerpt in our book doesn't cover butterflies, we learn about them in science class. I am about to send away for our larvae so that we can begin to study their life cycle after spring break! We will be using the Journey North website.

If you are looking for companion books, check out The Story of Three Whales. It's a story we used to read when I used Open Court for second grade.

 It is about three whales who, in an unusually warm winter, missed the signs that winter was coming (probably due to global warming) and it was necessary to migrate south to a warmer climate. They got trapped in ice, and by some miracle, two whales survived after some human intervention and help from an ice breaking ship.

We watched this whale echolocation video to learn more about how whales communicate and find a sense of direction on their long journey.

We also learned about locust plagues. BBC created this great video about The Plagues of Locusts in Africa.