Ah well.
Wanted to show off my latest efforts. If you teach in Virginia (and possibly other places), one of our lovely standards is that we have to teach the white-tailed deer as part of our life cycle standard. Yep, must be a hunter there in the capital!
Anywho, there's not much out there kid-friendly or even activity-wise about white tailed deer (unless I've been looking in all the wrong places!). For my VA friends, I've created a packet to help you out! Also, be sure to check out my wiki page on life cycles - I've uploaded a video from the VDGIF that they created just for this standard! (You can also find it on their website).
The packet includes the are/have/live charts I've really grown to love using! Whether we're completing them cooperatively, or the students are doing it independently, they are wonderful! Not sure who came up with the idea, but thanks! It also includes a diagram (cut/paste) of the deer and a life cycle chart (3 different versions). Click on the picture to go check it out! ;)
Next up, Contractions. Had a brainstorm while planning with my collab teacher....trying to think of some sort of game the kids could play with contractions that was similar to the ones we did for abbreviations (they LOVED "Abbreviation Call Out"). So, after racking my brain, I came up with "Building Contractions."
I focused on not, is/am, will, and have contractions. This set comes with letter cards to "build" the two words that form a contraction (such as can and not). "Bossy apostrophe" comes along, tells certain letters to sit down, takes their cards, and puts him/herself in the place of the letters.
It really helped my students understand about the contraction and where the apostrophe goes! We made a list of the contractions as we "built" them, and students were able to see a pattern of which letters were replaced. It was another big hit with my students and the understanding has shown in their work! :) Click on the picture above to check it out further!
The last activity I have to share with you is the what I created for my money unit. I have to confess - I am using some ideas from Investigations, but my kiddos this year just can't get the "abstract" part of the series, so I have been branching out on my own. I am completing a 5 day unit on money and will begin a 5 day unit on time (to the nearest five minutes). My kiddos lack the basic skills to "build on" to where Investigations say they should be, and though we've been practicing money all year long...well, time is another story.
I went shopping for a lot of time things over the "super sale" weekend. I will be going through these and will share some of the units/activities I bought in another post.
Until then, I'm pretty proud of the money activities I created. Some of them are old ideas "refreshed," but my favorite is my "money mat." My kids in the past have had skills with counting, but when it comes to writing money - well, let's just say seeing the cents mark at the end of a dollar amount gets old after awhile, right? Almost makes me want to teach decimals to the kids before writing money! But that's a whole other concept and not exactly in our standards for second! :)
So, I am posting my money unit that I wrote on Google Drive for you to access {here}. However, please check out some of the activities that go with the unit by clicking on the picture below!
Hope you were able to see something you could use! :) Have a great week!
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