Well it’s Sunday night. I, Lindsey, always get a little depressed on Sunday night because I SO enjoy my weekend and the sleep I get. But, this week will be super busy and will go by quickly and I will be enjoying my sleep next weekend soon!
I want to start by sharing our final writing project AND share my fail which turned out in the end so it wasn’t too bad.
My original plan was to have the kiddos use white crayons to make the spider webs and then watercolor paint over them. Great idea, right??? Well, see the problem was I didn’t have any watercolor paint. So I thought “hmmm…I’ll just water down the tempera paint…GENIUS!” Well…not so much. That didn’t work AT ALL! So then I thought “Glue lines! YES! That’s the answer!” So we took our glue and made spiders webs with it. Then we let them dry over night. The next day we painted over them and you know what??? That didn’t work. Disappointing. So after the paint dried, we put glitter webs on top. My quick project took two days. FAIL. But, they turned out cute and the writing was pretty decent so we rolled with it:)
This week we are going to start working on research projects. We use Sarah Cooley’s project which you can get here or here. OR you can click on the picture:)
This is a great project! The kiddos LOVE it and she has templates for different topics or a blank template. It is fantastic! We use the animal template which is the reason why my local library no longer has non-fiction animal books:)
This is only a fraction of the books I checked out!
I let the kiddos pick their animal. They research them in partners but they write their own report when they are finished. Then they present their information, in partners. In the past, I have had them make posters to share their information but this year they are going to have the option to make a power point. I am up to six computers in my class, woohoo, so I think that we will be able to do it without having to find time to go to the lab.
This week we are also going to begin locating key details in a text. We are going to begin questioning in a few weeks and we want to make sure that the kiddos can find the key details that they will be asking questions about…kind of important. Now, this week is conference week which means we have a week of half days. Our research projects take A LOT of time so we are just touching on key details this week and will dive a little deeper next week.
