Saturday, June 2, 2012

Under the deep, blue, sea

4 days and counting!!! I am so jealous of all of you who are already done for the summer! I can not wait to lay by the pool, sip margaritas, and plan out next years curriculum calendar!! (Had to throw that last one in there haha)

This is the first year I've really dived into an ocean theme. I have to say I was really surprised at how little some of my students knew about the ocean. Especially considering they go to school FIVE MINUTES away from the ocean. Yes, you read that right. If I wanted to go to the beach after work I could be on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in five minutes. (Don't be hatin') Anyways....

We started the week with a great book Deanna Jump wrote and included in her Ocean Unit (which many of these activities are from). I loved the book and activity she made to go along with it because my class has been studying nouns, verbs and adjectives the last two months and this was a perfect review! The kids filled in the parts of speech as they heard them (I paused after each page to let them write) and then they helped me compile a master list on the board.

Each time we learned about a new sea animal we wrote about them in our Ocean Animal Journals. I made the cover, but the great graphic organizers are from Deanna's unit.
Here we compared Orca Whales and Great White Sharks:
And while we were learning about sharks we used Deanna's poem to review subtraction.
The last thing we did from Deanna's unit was the adorable Pool vs. Ocean Glyphs. These turned out SO STINKIN CUTE! I made sure to ask my kids ahead of time what they preferred so they didn't answer based on what would get them fins, snorkels, etc. You'll notice my beach girl, complete with wedding ring because one of my girls was very concerned that my glyph didn't look like me without the ring. Ha!
Here are some of our Ocean Centers, from my Under the Sea pack:
Turtle Tallies
Greatest to Least

Octopus Ordinal Numbers

Skip Counting

Scuba Time to the hour

number families and subtraction sentences
beginning r blends

building sight words

bossy "e" words

substituting sounds

picture/word match up

beginning & ending blends
 Some of the books we read this week:
We also made our graduation portraits this week:
Because we are STILL practicing for graduation :)
The end will be here before we know it!!!

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