Five for Fraturday

I was SO excited to link up for my first ever Five for Friday and then....I had too much fun Friday night at a Lia Sophia jewelry party that I didn't make it home until it had turned into Saturday. Oops. I needed that though. Yesterday marked the end of the 1st quarter and it was time to woooosah!

So I'm joining in with Doodle Bugs Teaching even if it's a day late. 

 

{One}

This week we were learning about plants. We used clay, chenille sticks, and tissue paper to make models of flowers.

{Two}

We also did an activity where we made some observations of different flowers and recorded similarities and differences. We also noted what characteristics would make a pollinator more or less attracted to a particular flower. 

  

{Three}

We used Thinking Maps (a brace and flow map) to work on problem solving in math. The brace map helped us separate our word problem into the important parts. The flow map helped us think about the steps we'd have to go through to solve. 

 

 

{Four}

We used flow maps again, but this time for writing. We wrote paragraphs on how to settle a colony. Kiddos needed to reflect on the experiences of the colonists at Jamestown and Plymouth to decide what steps would be helpful in settling a successful colony. 

{Five}

Guess who had a ridiculous amount of fun at the Lia Sophia party and decided to become a Lia Sophia Advisor? Yep! It was me!! Can't wait to get my starter kit and all the jewelry. So fun.

Here are the pieces I'm most excited to get. I love them!

 

 

Enjoy the rest of your weekend everyone!

Bubble Maps and Word Clouds

The bubble map seems to be the hardest map for my kiddos to grasp because the bubbles have to contain ONLY adjectives or adjective phrases. Students tend to want to put any phrase in the bubbles (and you'll see a lot of "bubble maps" like this floating around the web).

As excited as I was to have students making bubble maps I was equally excited to use this Word Cloud generator from abcya.com. 

We took our bubble maps to the computer lab and came out with a neat little piece of art for our classroom. Below are some screenshots that show just how easy this program is to use. This is a word cloud I made about my pup Lily.




Don't they come out darling!!