Winter Cinquain Poems

Every year, I feel the time crunch between Thanksgiving break and December winter break. This fun poem writing activity helps us practice poem writing and parts of speech. Plus, it's fun to color and stick up on a bulletin board!

Students get to pick a Google Slide and then they type their poem in the text box. It's easy to print all of them because they are all in one presentation. No one has deleted anyone else's slide, but it's a pretty easy fix if they do because I keep a master copy and then share an editable one with them in Google Classroom / Drive.

Before doing this writing assignment, we practice the Eight Parts of Speech song, which comes from Scholastic's Memory-Boosting Mnemonic Songs. 

Here are a couple of slides from the Google Slides presentation I created to go along with the song.

Find the editable poem presentation in my TPT store here. 

This 30 slide PowerPoint presentation includes 28 editable fill-in-the-blank poem pages with directions an examples. You will also get a link to the editable Google Slides presentation. These poems look great as a bulletin board. Just print, color, cut, and glue onto construction paper!

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

Beautiful Bulletin Boards

I have been taking pictures of some of the adorable bulletin boards going up in our school lately and just had to share them! Keep in mind that none of these are mine. For more of my bulletin board posts, click here.

Atmosphere flap books - lift each one for a description of that layer

Owl door decorations

Friendly Letters

Art bulletin board - symmetry

Leaping Limericks bulletin board - shamrocks and rainbows!

I also figured it was time for a bulletin board "linky party!" If you've never heard of them, they're basically a place for bloggers to network common ideas. The last one I remember seeing one for bulletin boards was in July when Denise at Sunny Days in Second Grade started one. We have had practically a whole school year since then! All you have to do is link back a new or old post with bulletin boards and grab the logo from up top! If you have freebies to go with them, that's even better!

For a collection of links to more linky parties, click here.

To see more bulletin boards on Pinterest, click the picture!

In Like A Lion and Out Like a Lamb: Spring Similes and March Metaphors

Well, not so much this year in NJ! We had an extremely calm winter (that has felt like spring at times) with only 2 days of snow where I live! We're finishing up our weather chapter in science, so I thought the theme would make the perfect bulletin board. We've also been focusing on using figurative language (especially similes and metaphors) in writing. This book is great for introducing personification too!

My March bulletin board is going to showcase our writing. Students will be drawing literal and figurative meanings of common similes and metaphors. 

Download my list of March Metaphors and Spring Similes by clicking here! 

For some lion and lamb activities, click here or on the picture.

Click the maze to download it!

Make these crafts!

We love multiplication and division!

We made some neat multiplication arrays using candy hearts. It took 2 eight ounce bags to make 22 of them. To make it fair, I pulled flashcards to tell each student what array to make. This can also be a great division activity if you tell them how many rows they need to divide their hearts into. They can easily find the remainder!

Just arrange them into arrays, glue, color, and write your number sentence!

We have also been using fact family triangles to make the connection to division. Students wrote the fact families from the front and back of their cards on dry erase boards, then switched with other classmates in their groups.

 

We also used various manipulatives and divided them into equal groups to solve word problems. Whatever was left over was our remainders. It was a great way to understand the vocabulary words divisible and remainder!

Super Goals and Souper Bowls!

Fresh off a NY Giants NFC East Championship this weekend, I decided to put a fun twist on my New Years bulletin boards. The theme was "Super Goals and Souper Bowls!" I did something similar around the time of the World Cup with soccer balls, so I thought football was only natural with the Super Bowl coming up! We've also been working on homophones, homonyms, and puns, so the kids got a kick out of the idea! (Haha...couldn't help myself!)

The background was created with green bulletin board paper, paper plates, napkins, a yardstick, and white chalk. It's so long I had to take 2 pictures (but it's really one piece of paper). I added the lines and stapled the paper to my bulletin boards after this picture was taken. We used some football-related clipart to write our academic or personal goals!

works in progress (I drew writing lines on them before photocopying)

Right after we did this, I found a great free graphic organizer that would have helped tons.

We used AlphaBits cereal and plastic spoons glued to paper bowls to spell out our goals.

Recipe for a fun: Alpha-Bits cereal (locate them near you here), Styrafoam bowls, plastic spoons, hot glue gun to glue plastic spoon to bowl, and paste to glue down cereal (It's hard to see with white bowls, but it looks like real milk, and some cereal bits even look wet!)

 Picking out the letters is tough work because it doesn't appear that the box contains all 26! Tips from our class: turn a Z sideways for an N and backwards for a funky S. Bite the rounded part of a B off for an E and then turn it upside down for an M and right side up for a W. Break parts off of an L to make a T or and I. Find a slightly misshapen X to use as a K. Break off part of an O to make a C.

After some bowls were decorated with marker...the letters are cut out and ready for the bulletin board!

 Practice basketball...think he was inspired by this week's Journeys story Jump?

Learn to swim

Hit a baseball...he was inspired by the Roberto Clemente story!

Learn ballet

And of course, some academic goals!

I think if our behavior is good for the rest of the month, we might just have an in-school Super Bowl party. I found some cute (and not so healthy, but hey...it's one day a year) food ideas on Pinterest: 

 

Hopefully I'll be wearing this jersey on the big day, rooting on my G-men:

I also found these super cute football leg warmers to wear!

Update: The Giants DID WIN THE SUPERBOWL! In celebration, I have uploaded a free football flipchart! It includes a football words word wall and speculative writing prompt! :)