Back Full Swing

There is no rest for the weary.  Not even during winter break.

Which unfortunately, is much of the reason why I have not written in so long.  I should probably just admit that keeping up with a blog is not my strong suit, but I LOVE sharing what I do so I refuse to give up!  It can be so hard as a teacher to find the inspiration to continue to create new materials, so whatever I can do to help I will do with gusto.

Anyways.  Off my soap box.

We are full blown into our Pushes and Pulls unit.  We are working with the California Next Generation Science Standards  and oh baby are they a doozy!  But we are having fun, experimenting with pushes and pulls.

Last week, we did an experiment with cars and marbles.  Our challenge was to move them from one end of the table to the other only pushing them.  They got pretty creative!  I had kids blowing on them, lifting the table, and pushing them with their fingers.  None of which I prompted.

This week, we are talking about pull.  And what better way to do that than by reading "Los tres cerditos y el lobo no tan feroz"?

This one was fun because we got to talk about the different forces the wolf could have used to knock down the pigs' houses.  We realized he could have pulled the doors down, he could have knocked the houses down by hitting them with hammers, by kicking them, etc.  To compliment this, we did a cute and fun craftivity.

Yep, craftivity.

Here's the teacher sample:

We made a wolf with construction paper, a house, and glued some writing lines on the house.  Then we wrote (English translation): To blow the house down the wolf can _____________.  They came out SO CUTE!  I'm putting them up tomorrow with a cute banner I made that says "Sopló y sopló y..."

All in all, it has been an excellent start back at school.  

I'm working on actually typing out the lessons we are doing for our units rather than keeping everything scattered in a file, so once I have that done it will be going up on TpT.

Speaking of which!  I have a new simple center I put up on TpT.  But first, let me explain it.  It's called, "Read It, Lace It, Write It" o sea, "Léalo, ensártalo, escríbelo".  

You will need:

* Letter beads

Pipe cleaners (cut in half)

Sight word flash cards

Recording sheets

Each student gets a little container or baggie with alphabet beads in them (have a mommy in your class put the letters in there that they will need to form the sight words, no more no less), a set of flash cards and a recording sheet.  They pick a flashcard, read the word, form the word with beads on their pipe cleaner (lace it) and then write it on the recording sheet.

Easy as that!

I'm doing this one next week - it will be one of my independent centers for a formal observation (eek!) with my vice principal (double eek!).

Click the picture to go straight to my TpT store!

Alright, I think I'm done for the day!  Hopefully my next post will come sooner than a month from now...