St. Patrick's Day fun activities

Here are some things we've been doing this March to celebrate St. Patrick's Day! Click the links or images to go to my TPT store.

St. Patrick's Day Lucky Opinion Writing

St. Patrick's Day Math coloring pages

St. Patrick's Day Rich Opinion Writing

Dolch Rainbow Sight Words Pack

                          
                        

Check out my old post for some more fun St. Patrick's Day ideas!

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!

Lucky Limericks

We continue to lag slightly behind in St. Patrick's Day celebration! I am finally posting pictures of the fire department's pipes and drums visit last week. You can see pictures of our party here.

We are working on poem prompts and getting ready for the NJ ASK (our standardized tests for grades 3-8), so we had a little fun writing our own limericks. First we read some limericks and counted syllables in each line, plus analyzed their rhyme schemes. A limerick follows AABBA format.

I made this page for my Promethean flipchart:

Then students picked a topic and took a shot at it. I had them put a dot over each word when counting the number of syllables in each line. Then they wrote the number at the end so I could check it. Some were pretty silly or just plain made up! (We know the moon doesn't give off light!)

I find these and haikus to be the easiest poems to write because they have an easy rhythm...if students 

pick words that are easy to rhyme! I got these Webster's Rhyming Dictionaries in the Target Dollar Spot this summer!

Kids cut and glued these pieces (from March 2006's Teacher's Helper) to construction paper.

If you can't find one, try an online Rhyming Dictionary like Rhyme Zone.

 If you want to try this, but need more structure for your kids, head over to Fourth Grade Freebies from the High-Tech Teacher to download her limerick poem template!

Do you have any favorite poetry resources?

"Rich Writing"

On Monday, I gave my students a challenge of writing about whether they were rich or not. At first, their answers were, "Of course not! I don't have a lot of money!" After which we followed up with a discussion about what makes one rich. We talked about how important it was to have friends, family, health, and basic needs such as food, water, shelter, and clothing. I added that many people in other towns, states, and countries don't have their needs met. Then some of my students went in the opposite direction. "I have a big screen tv with lots of channels, and lots of toys!" they started to brag. I tried to get them to reach a happy medium and realize that it's important to realize that you are rich if you are happy and have your basic needs met. Not sure if they all really got the point, but here are some samples....

Did You Get Lucky?

We had a blast celebrating St. Patrick's Day yesterday! 

I made shepherd's pie for the kids and we drank green leprechaun juice (green Hawaiian Punch) as well as soda bread and green fruits and veggies (grapes, celery, broccoli, cucumbers, and pears).

To make shepherd's pie, add ketchup and brown sugar to cooked, drained ground beef. Add vegetables such as green beans, carrots, peas, and corn. Put a layer of mashed potatoes on top, and add cheese or gravy! Bake until cheese is melted.

We raised our glasses for Slainte! (a toast to good health).... 

and did some Lucky Charms marshmallow graphing!

I got these cute little leprechaun hats at the dollar store, but the kids drove me nuts because they broke the elastics when putting them on, then tried to snap the string at each other, and the hats kept falling off when I was trying to take pictures! It did make for some funny faces, as you will see!

We wrote an explanatory paragraph telling why we felt lucky to know a special someone in our lives.

Then we got really silly listening to Celtic music, learning about the Blarney Stone, and had some fun imitating Irish stepdancers. 

Then we played St. Patrick's Day I Have, Who Has - division-style!

The kids thought the Irish flag looked a lot like the Indian flag... except they decided that the orange must be for Irish hair color, white is for the pale skin, and green is for the hills of Ireland...hahaha! My grandmother's maiden name was Hogan, so I am 1/4 Irish. I definitely have pale skin that burns and my hair gets reddish in the summer....so they might be right!

Now they are all hurrying to read to fill up their leprechaun sticker charts to get a homework pass!

Anyway...it's time to announce the winners of the Busy Bee Birthday Bash!

The winner of the $29 Amazon e-gift card is:

comment #21 Kelly B aka Queen Bee!

She must have been really lucky because not only does she have a bee theme like me, but she also posted at 3:05 am.... and my birthday is 3/05!

Other winners include:

Read the Room Sheets:
Mrs. Richling
Rachel
Jennifer @ First Grade Blue Skies
Shelia
Linda @ Down the Learning Road
Jennifer @ The First Grade Dream

Dolch Sight Words Pack:
Jennifer @Keys for Education
Amy @ The Resource(ful) Room
The Polka Dot Owl
Meghan @ Third Grade in the First State

Creative Writing Genres Posters and Book Lists
Mrs. Lazenby

Bossy R Turkey Feather Game
Jennifer @ Herding Kats in Kindergarten

Ladies, check your emails on Sunday to collect your winnings.
If you didn't leave an email address, please leave one here!

Also, I promised 29 winners...so if you left an entry on the original blog post but did not tell what you liked from TPT, this is your last chance to check out my TPT store and leave a comment here telling what you'd like!

Just in Time, Abraham Lincoln!

I know it's kind of late to be posting about Presidents' Day, but things have been crazy between conferences, report cards, and getting ready for Read Across America Day and our author's visit from Patricia Polacco. It's about two months away, but I wanted to get my students ready for her visit, so I killed two birds with one stone. Last week I read them Just in Time, Abraham Lincoln! This week they will be reading some of her other books in literature circles.

If you're looking for comprehension questions, check this freebie out! It has 15 comprehension questions and one open-ended essay.

In addition to all sorts of other President-themed activities, we visited http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents to learn about and write 3 facts about two presidents each. Two presidents x 22 students = 44 presidential fact pages! We also wrote about three things we'd like to accomplish if we were President or one thing we'd accomplish and three things we'd do to accomplish it. We decided that it would be a pretty tough job!

We also took the White House virtual tour.

I showed students pictures from my visits to the Washington area a few years ago.

Can you name the following monuments, statues, and buildings?

Ford's Theater, where Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth

(closed for repairs when I was there)

The House Where Lincoln Died

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery

Arlington National Cemetery

Eternal flame and graves of JFK and his widow, Jackie

Visit the White House National Park if you're in the Washington, DC area!