Read Across America Week....Pt 2

Whew!  While I love the enthusiasm of the students and providing them with a fun "Seussy Makerspace" this week, it has been exhausting!  Between untangling fishing lines from our "One Fish, Two Fish" station or just handling 300 some kids in the library for our "Seuss Parade" on Wednesday, it has been a busy week!

So, I thought I would share pictures!  Of course, I didn't remember until Thursday to take pictures of each of the stations, but hopefully you will get the idea!

I made little signs for each station using some cute frames I had picked up at Michaels on clearance a few years back. They come in handy, but I wish I had picked up more than 6!

On Wednesday, students dressed up as their favorite Seuss character and we had a parade around the school so they could show off their costumes!

Make a Cat in the Hat station

Draw a favorite Seuss character

I pulled Seuss books from the shelves for students to access easier for checkout, and also found some free apps that read Seuss stories!  I locked the app in so I didn't have to worry about students straying into other apps!

One fish, Two Fish:  had great fun fishing from the pond, but boy, I think I only had 1 class that didn't tangle the fishing lines!

The photo booth:  students and teachers alike loved this station!  I let my 2-5th graders take their own pictures, but I went ahead and rotated around stations with K and 1 so I could take their pics!  This was a BIG hit!  I think I'm going to do it again, maybe for Children's Book Week in May, and create props of favorite book characters!

So, that was a peek at my week!  I got to announce our 3 winners today for estimating the goldfish and they were so excited!  We're also participating in the "IditaREAD" as well.  Can't wait til tomorrow for the start! :)

Read the Most From Coast to Coast and Read Across America Week

You'd think after a week of snow days, I'd be more prepared, but nope, here I am at school again on a Sunday trying to get things done!  Well, some of that includes copying and getting things ready for this Friday and next week, so I guess I have some excuse!

Nevertheless, this Friday, we are participating in Renaissance Learning's "Read the Most from Coast to Coast."  You can find out more on their website {here}.  That will be our kickoff for Read Across America week.  We're extending it a week because frankly, I want it to go back to the way it was when we did it several years ago when it was BIG.  Being the library media specialist and part of the correlate that is putting on the whole show, I find myself mostly in charge! :)  One of our committee members brought up a good point that while Dr. Seuss is fun for the younger crowd, the fourth and fifth graders see the whole thing as babyish, so we're doing "Read Across America" week instead of "Dr. Seuss Week."  Still, we're dressing up as favorite characters and other things during the week, having quotes announced each morning from authors, and highlighting different genres.  One of our members also made a "choice board" so teachers could fit what they could into the curriculum.  After a week of missed school, it should be well appreciated!

While I'm still getting together my centers, lessons, etc for the library, I do have something I wanted to share with you!  With the "Read the Most" with "Across America," I thought it would be cute to do an interactive poster/board.  While not an original idea (I saw something on Pinterest), I thought it would go well with a reading challenge to our teachers based on the # of pages read during class.  We're throwing in math and graphing to the mix and providing teachers with different templates to use (younger grades can use the hundreds chart while older grades can create bar graphs or line graphs).  We're lucky enough to have a poster maker in our school, so I'll be taking "orders" this week to what type of graphs each teacher wants!

I'm also going to make a poster of the USA with cute cars that count for each 100 pages read.  I googled and found that from VA Beach, VA to San Jose, CA is almost 3,000 miles (2,990 to be exact), so hence the 3,000 goal.  I'm hoping we'll exceed that!  So, please click on the link {here} to access this file on Google Drive.  I won't be uploading it to my store at this point and wanted to offer it as a freebie to my readers!

So, between Virginia Readers Choice and other reading challenges, I hope to be posting and sharing more soon! (The Iditarod is coming up and I am so psyched to do something in the library about it!!!).

How Much CAN You Fit in 5 Days???

Good question.

So much, I thought I'd link up with Doodle Bug's 5 for Friday (even though it's Sunday!)



It was a busy week.  Between Famous American projects, Dr. Seuss activities, finishing our Polar/Animal Unit, and Place Value - yeah, we crammed a lot in! ;)

And now they're calling for some sort of wintry storm this week?  Really?  *Sigh*  What happened to the groundhog promising us an early Spring?  Our next teacher workday is March 18, and I am holding desperately to it!  That, and I'm ready for SPRING!  My two kids and myself are looking forward to Busch Gardens opening on March 16 - oh yeah,we are there! ;)  Even Dave Ramsey couldn't get me to let go of our season passes!!!

Hah hah.  I digress.  Back to part you're interested in, right?

It was the annual Famous Americans project.  LOVE this project!  It always turns out so cute!  My kiddos were so proud of their projects! We had 9 (yeah, 9!) Jackie Robinsons, 4 Helen Kellers, 1 George Washington, and 1 Abraham Lincoln.  Those were the famous Americans we studied back in December.  The students were allowed to choose anyone, so add to that Albert Einstein, Billie Holiday, Harriet Tubman, Garrett Morgan (inventor of the traffic sign), and Thomas Edison.  Didn't they turn out cute?

Had to put all the Jackie Robinsons together, like in their own club - neat how they all turned out different!  Have to show you this stylin' Helen Keller one of my kiddos did.  A sequin belt - I love it!

We also celebrated Dr. Seuss all week long with activities.  I incorporated literacy centers I had downloaded/purchased last year (that are now gone, thanks to the copyright battle there!) in my reading groups, but used new ones for writing/read aloud time.  All these are linked on my Dr. Seuss Pinterest page.  Aren't my kids cute who dressed up for the day?

We created a wocket and wrote a sentence about it.

Created a hat from a reading glyph I got years ago from Mailbox.

Drew ourselves as a "Who" and wrote about what we'd say to Horton.  Most of my students said "thanks" and told Horton about living in Whoville.  One of my kiddos, though, asked Horton to send him a 4-Wheeler!  Not quite sure how it would fit on the speck!

Wrote green eggs and ham poetry.

Then, we finished our Polar/Animal Unit by doing a "mind dump" and creating graffiti walls.  I love this idea and like so many others, I tend to forget them until I have an "aha!" moment (since I like to keep things fresh with the kids.....SCOOT is great, 4 Corners is great, but sometimes - especially when they've been wiggly like this week - new ideas are great!).  I think they could have spent the rest of the day on it!

On Thursday, we had fun building place value with marshmallows and ringed cereal from Babbling Abby's freebie.  

On Friday, we read The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and created place value houses.  This was a fantastic idea I got from The Lemonade Stand via Pinterest.   Love the castle this one created!

Sooo...this weekend, I've been getting ready for our Plant Unit - life cycles, erosion, plant parts, and uses.  That covers about 2 1/2 standards.  I've had this super cute detective clipart from mycutegraphics.com and I finally used it!  Click on the picture to check it out - it's a review game about plants and erosion (for you VA teachers, it covers 2.4 plant life cycles, 2.8 plant resources, 2.7 erosion) that can be played in any number of ways - you can make it a SCOOT game, a scavenger hunt, etc.

What a Seusstastical Day! :)

My school does things up BIG, especially when it comes to reading! We started out the day with an assembly, which the Cat in the Hat revealed that he would be playing tricks during the day because he thought this was a great place to stay! Students came dressed as their favorite characters, and we did Seuss activities all day long! We did both math and literacy centers with a Seuss theme (thank you to all the people who posted freebies on their blogs!!!), and during our reading time, we were surprised by the CAT who sprayed water on us! At 2:00, there was an announcement that to get rid of the cat, we all had to go to the hallway and if we were reading, we'd scare him away! Enjoy the photos of our day below! :)




My "cast of characters" (aka class)


My team (I'm holding a different book since I didn't have my "Daisy Head Maisy" one! :)