Author's Purpose, Fact Families, and more.

We learned about the butterfly lifecycle, and after watching a few videos and going through the steps, students got to create this project. First, they sequenced the steps on another graphic organizer, then wrote those steps in a paragraph. To make the cycle, we folded a paper plate into quarters and labeled the 4 states. For the egg, we used a pompom on a construction paper leaf. The caterpillar was a pipe cleaner. The pupa was a piece of crumpled up tissue paper hanging off a construction paper branch, and the butterfly was a foam sticker. 

Fact families were the focus of math this week. Teaching in the Tongass came out with this free place setting clipart and I used it to create a fact family project. They write the three numbers on the plate, and write the four related addition and subtraction sentences on the utensils. They take a construction paper and design it as a place mat, and then arrange their setting! You can pick this little ditty up here. 

For Language Arts, we focused on Author's Purpose. After getting acquainted with the three main author's purposes, we used old Scholastic book orders to identify books with each purpose. I gave them labels and they sectioned their construction paper into thirds. We did the persuasive books together, as guided modeling, and plus, they didn't really know a lot of the books in there and without seeing, it's hard to tell what's persuasive and what's not. But inform and entertain, they did on their own. You could figure out by the description and the cover pictures which was which. 

You can grab the labels for this project HERE. 

  

I had them write a persuasive story about pretending to be a turkey who does not want to be eaten. They had to write all the reasons that could deter the human from gobbling them up and then they made this cute turkey. I loved the reason, "Why don't you and I go sneak into Six Flags and go on rides without tickets instead?"

You can find this craft plus a Pilgrim writing/craft in my Craft and Write: Thanksgiving Pack.

 Finally, a few funnies. 

The bonus on each spelling test tells the student to draw a picture of number 6 (the word that was 6th on the list). We have been doing this for about 7 weeks with the same pattern each week. 

And this is what I got yesterday. I guess...technically he deserves points??.. :)

And second, after a few of my boys started bringing in Legos, secretly trading them, and then getting into arguments about what they promised each other in trades, I told them not to bring them in anymore. The picture below shows what I have collected AFTER the ban. Two of them just won't stop! They think they are so sneaky! I just walk up to them, put my hand out, and they end up emptying their pockets. It went from, "You'll get these back after a week," to "after a month," to, "at parent-teacher conferences," and finally, "at the end of the year." And would you believe it that they still continue to bring them in? I doubt I will keep them till the end of the year but should I give in?? lol. What do you think I could make off of these? ;)