Cloudy and the 50th Day

So, my plans to post last week were thwarted when I was thrust into becoming a CSI detective. Let me just tell y’all that I would make an EXCELLENT investigator should anyone ever need a private eye. For real. I successfully caught someone impersonating someone else & TOTALLY trying to scam one of my friends on Facebook! I SO felt like I was living in a Lifetime movie last week!! I had NO time for anything other than sleuthing. Now that that whole saga is over…*I think for now anyway*…I’m ready to play catch-up.

We learned all about clouds and the kids had a BLAST!!! Actually, I think I might’ve had a *little* more fun than them :) I don’t know why, but I LOVE teaching about clouds and the weather! SO fun!!

I was inspired by my sweet friend, Abby, to make these fun little cloud guys. These were such a great visual to get my kids to understand what kind of clouds are high/low in the sky.

We also made little cloud anchor charts that my kids used throughout the week for writing.

We described clouds…

And we even made little cloud flip books…inspired by the fabulous Anna Brantley over at Crazy for First Grade …and practiced labeled them, too.

For word work, we practiced writing our popcorn & spelling words in the clouds :) This was definitely a class FAVORITE!! I thought of my grandpa ALL day…the classroom smelled JUST like him ;)

The activity that had the class talkin’ for DAYS after it was over was this great little craftivity we did after we read the book, “It Looked Like Spilt Milk”. The kids did a little writing… “Sometimes clouds can look like...” and then we followed it up with a little “get-your-hands-dirty” kinda craft. We just mixed equal parts glue and shaving cream together and painted it in the shape that we wrote about. When the mixture dries, the cloud stays puffy and it gives a little when you touch it. It was the COOLEST thing!!!!

This was the cloud my sweet student teacher made…

And this is one from one of my sweeties…

We made our “Very Busy First Graders” spiders and hung them from the ceilings. Last year we put them on the door, but I’ve yet to touch the door since the school year started :)

We also learned about bats!!! I didn’t take pictures of most of our work, but here’s our little “bat cave”. I made a big giant bat full of bat facts we collected as we read several different non-fiction bat books. I had the kids make little paper bag bats and then write two facts on the pink strip {we did this for writing one day}.

We’ve definitely kept ourselves busy these last few weeks! Now we’re getting SUPER excited about the 50th day next week!!! Woo hoo!!!! I’m pretty sure I lived in the fifties in my former life {ha!!} because I SOOOO love anything and everything poodle skirts and cuffed jeans. We’re excited about celebrating our halfway to the 100th day! I’m getting all my fun stuff ready for next week when we enjoy the 50th day festivities!!! Here’s just a little sneak peek…

If you’re interested in incorporating some of these craftivities into your 50th day plans, you can check out my newest little mini unit on TpT… “Cruisin’ Through the 50 First Days of School”. I included the templates and directions and several other fun little activities…

It’s usually $5, but you can grab it for $4 until Thursday! EVERYTHING in my little shop is 20% off ‘til Thursday. I’m giving away this little mini unit to the first person who leaves me a comment and correctly guesses my favorite 1950’s artist and/or song. WOW…that covers A LOT of ground ;)

Alright now…time to watch my boys WIN!!!!! GO RANGERS!!!!!!

What’s The Weather?!

We’ve been studying the weather the last few weeks in Science and it’s been FUN to say the least! I love hearing the kids talk about the clouds when we’re outside… “Look Mrs. Carroll! That’s a stratus cloud!!” They’ve become such awesome little weather watchers, SO very interested in anything and everything weather!! Here are a few little things we did for this fun little unit!

We watched a really neat video about the different types of weather and read some pretty cool non-fiction books, too! We made a little word web to show what we learned…

We added weather poems to our poetry journals {no pics, but you can download them below.}

We also learned about the water cycle and how it affects our weather.

We made water cycle bracelets using little beads and yarn. Each bead stood for a different phase of the water cycle: dark blue-condensation, light blue-precipitation, yellow-evaporation. I also had the kids label a diagram of the water cycle to keep in their science journals.

We also updated our science journals with weather graphs to help us observe and record the daily weather.

We read this book about clouds…

and then we brainstormed adjectives to describe the different types.

We read this book…

And made our own little class book adapted from this story. They made their own tear paper cloud shaped like an object and used the sentence prompt, “My little cloud changed into a …”

We graphed our favorite types of clouds…

and interpreted the data…

Speaking of observations, we also observed changes over an extended period of time…changes that occur due to weather…and we used trees to illustrate this concept. I had the kids choose between several different mediums to show the seasons of a tree. I LOVE how different they all turned out!!

We also talked about the wind. We brought in hair dryers to show how wind moves and the kids got to be little wind makers using a straw and cotton balls. They also got to make wind socks to take home and observe wind direction and movement.

For a little bit of fun, we read this book…

and pretended, “what if?!” We used the sentence prompt, “I wish it would rain…” to add another entry to our Reader’s Response journals.

We’re about to send home a really cool MOON project, so stay tuned!!