Plants and Living Things {plus freebies!}

Spring is just around the corner! With the sunshine and warmer weather, it makes it the perfect time of year to begin a study on plants and living things.

 

To gain some background knowledge, I always start off by creating some sort of anchor chart or schema chart of all the things we think we know about plants. It's always interesting to see what the students come up with. A lot of times, they surprise me with how much they know!
 

After creating our schema chart, I always tell my students that they are going to become scientists so that we can find out everything we want to know about plants and living things! I talk about all the things that good scientists have to do with this little anchor chart, which you can download for FREE by clicking on the photo below!

The perfect way to implement all three of these things is to have students create a journal. They can use this to draw and write observations, record facts, and more! The first thing we do at the beginning of the unit is practice making observations. We go outside for a walk and draw a picture of EVERYTHING we can observe. 

I remind them to include details about everything they can see. Then, we come back inside and share our observations with a partner!

The next day, we learned about the difference between living and nonliving things. We used some real pictures of objects and sorted them between living and non-living. I got the pictures here for free from the blog Chalk Talk! 

I made up our own little version of the picture sort for students to work on independently. You can download it for free by clicking the picture below!

We then went on another observation walk outside and recorded our observations of all the living and non-living things we saw.

Once we had a little background knowledge on living things, it was time to observe and inspect the seeds we would be planting. I gave each student a magnifying glass and we observed our seed using our five senses in our plant journals. They had SO much fun looking at the seed up close!

Now we are ready to plant our seeds! I called kids up 4-5 at a time and let them pour soil in a cup, observe and feel the soil, and plant their seed in the middle.

Once we planted seeds, it was time to find out what plants need to thrive and grow! We watched one of my favorite songs about the Needs of a Plant from Harry Kindergarten:

And then we used our plants and living things journals to record our learning!

We planted our seeds, watered them, and then put them outside everyday to get some sunshine! I just used a big paper box lid to put all of our plant cups in to make it easier to carry it in and out of the classroom. As they started to grow, we learned about and labeled all the parts of a plant in our journals next!

Day by day, we checked in on our plants and used the observation pages of our journals to record what our plants looked like every couple of days!

You can print as many of the observation journal pages as you need for however many days you plan on letting the kids observe their plants before taking them home.

Once the plants grew enough to see the stem and leaves pop out, I let my students take their plants home! They were so excited! I had more than one student tell me that they went home and planted their flowers in their yard at home.

You can find all of these activities and more (including plant vocabulary cards) in my Plants and Living Things Observation Journal in my TPT store. Just click on the picture below and it will take you right there!

Spider Study!

For the past week and a half, we have been up to our ears studying everything we can about spiders! I've never had the time to do a spider study before, so I was so excited to gather up as many spider-related resources as I could in reading, science, and math. I truly feel that cross-curricular studies are the most meaningful ones for students.

First, I began by collecting as many non-fiction books as I could find about spiders. Here are some options if you are looking for some great ones to use with your K-2 spider study.

I am blessed to have a smartboard in my classroom, so instead of using a bunch of chart paper to make various anchor charts and posters, I decided to streamline it and keep them all in digital form. It ended up working out SO nicely! We could easily go back and refer to our schema chart and add new notes pages for each topic we were learning about. Not to mention, I didn't have to worry about finding a place to hang up a million posters/anchor charts. Here's a few of our digital anchor charts we made:

Even if you don't have a smartboard in your room, you could easily create every single one of these anchor charts on big paper, powerpoint, etc.! We ended up making a separate page for each topic that we learned and studied about spiders.

I also got by with a little help from my TPT friends! I used A Year of Many Firsts' AMAZING non-fiction spider unit, which you can find here! She has gorgeous pictures and so many creative resources to use. We ended up referring to her spiders digital fact book, printable student readers, and spider fact book to record all of the facts we found. 

Lyndsey included 3 differentiated student read aloud books. I chose the middle leveled one for my first graders and we spent time reading and highlighting important details we found in the text.

Then we used the books to write our own facts in their student fact books, which we used all week to record facts about spiders.

Each book page had a different topic to write and draw about. My students loved filling it all out; and their writing turned out amazing! I'm so glad that there are amazing TPT sellers that help me teach wonderful units in my classroom! Thanks, Lyndsey!

Here are a few other fact-finding activities we did:

Parts of a Spider Labeling Anchor Chart

Then we used the anchor chart to label it using another resource from A Year of Many Firsts' spider unit. 

I also implemented many spider themed activities for whole group math, reading, and literacy centers. It's amazing what a little themed activity will do to increase my students' excitement and engagement in a learning activity. Since they were loving learning about spiders, they were all in on these fun activities! 

For our ELA time, I create this little Smartboard interactive Spider Sentence sort. The students had to move the spider's legs to the side of the body that it belonged to (sentence or not a sentence).

My students absolutely loved reading the Spider poem from Deedee Wills' October Poetry Unit. I gave them a giant plastic spider to act out the poem with each other's names and they couldn't even get over it! We'll be adding the poem to our reading interactive notebooks later this week and my kids will partner read it to practice fluency.

I also implemented our spider theme into many math activities we did last week. We've been working on addition concepts for the last few weeks, including decomposing numbers, so this adorable little freebie craftivity from Wild About Firsties was the perfect activity!

You can download the freebie here!

I hung them all up on a bulletin board in my classroom for some festive student decor!

We also did a little graphing activity: Do You Think Spiders are Cool or Creepy? Needless to say, I did NOT agree with the majority of my kids! Ha!

One of my teammates came up with this little data analysis sheet and we compared our results!

In math tubs, we've been working on fun themed activities like my Spidery Roll and Cover:

...Which can be found here along with other Halloween math tubs in my Trick or Treat! Math is Sweet! Math Stations Pack (click on the picture below to find out more!)

To add a little fun to literacy centers, I made this little Spider Digraph Spinner game that my students loved! They spun the spinner, and based on whatever digraph they landed on (ch, th, sh), they had to find a word that began or ended with the digraph and color it by the color code till they filled up the entire spider web!

You can download this game for FREE by clicking on the picture below!

So, with all the fun we had learning about spiders, I must admit I am sad to see it go! However, that will be short-lived because this week we are going to begin our BAT unit... always one of my faves!

Feeling Productive! {Workin' on it Wednesday}

As sad as this sounds, one of the best things about summer break is... I have time to work on more school stuff! I know, I know, it doesn't sound like the most ideal way for a teacher to spend her summer break - doing more work - but in reality, it's the best time to get ahead of myself and create some new projects that I just don't have much time to complete during the hustle and bustle of a school year. I'm linking up with Kim Adsit over at KinderGals to share a few of the things I've been working on for Workin' on it Wednesday!

Today has been quite the productive day! I've updated two of my current units for sale on TPT. One of them is the very first product I ever posted in my store, ABC Order Picture Sort & Literacy Game Pack, back in 2011. Needless to say, I've learned a lot about creating products since then! Just look at the picture below. The left is the cover page before (avert your eyes!!!) and the right is the cover page after (much prettier!). I'm still putting the finishing touches on a few of the pages, so I'll blog again when it's all ready to go.

One of the other products I added to is my Wood and Paper FOSS Kit Observation Journal. When I made it for my class, I simply made it to go with some of the wood experiments because that was all that we had time to do. I didn't create it with the intent to ever put it in my TPT store, but after using it with my students, decided to include it in hopes that others would find it useful. To my surprise, it has become my 3rd best selling unit - and it's the smallest of them all! I was so grateful that other teachers were using the journal to supplement their FOSS kit. I began to have multiple requests to add pages for some of the paper experiments as well, but never had time to create any...until now!

If you're anything like me, you know that the FOSS kits, while they come with a lot of great materials, lack anything quality to use for response sheets/journals/etc. much less something that is kindergarten appropriate. This journal is something that my students love using and it couldn't be easier to put together. Each page of the unit has 2 copies of the book so that you can simply just print it, cut it in half with a paper cutter, and staple it together. No having to shuffle through all of the pages to put it in order!

Click on the cover page below to go straight to the FOSS Kit journal in my TPT shop. You can grab it for just $2!

Don't worry, my summer hasn't just been spent working so far, though I do love having the extra time to devote to it! It's been a few weeks spent with family, friends, working out at the gym, relaxing, visiting with out of town relatives, and going to baseball games. I intend to fully enjoy this summer... and I hope you do too!