Spring or Autumn?

Hi Friends!

Are you in the Northern Hemisphere or Southern Hemisphere?

Down Under we are heading into Autumn, the weather is starting to cool slightly and I am definitely seeing signs of leaves turning colour.  It feels like it has been a bit late this year and quite frankly I am ok with that, the longer I don't have to wear Winter clothes the better I say!

I know that there are some crazy people out there who love the thought of getting out the Winter woollies and getting out into the brisk air.....but I am not one of them, if I could follow the sun year round I sure would!

To get into the mood of Autumn or Spring I am sharing a great freebie with you today!

Use this 5 senses Poem to get your students thinking about what they see, hear, feel, taste and touch in the different seasons. There is a template for each season and one generic one to use for any topic!

Just click on the pics to get your copy!

Holiday Randomness

Well friends I am in my second week of holidays and I have finally gotten out of my pyjamas :) No seriously I did get out of them a bit earlier last week.  I have not been as productive as I wanted to be although I have really invested A LOT of time with Pinterest.

Having said that this is what I have done so far on my hold, remember it is Winter here in Australia and I do not under any circumstances LOVE Winter, of course this is why I live in the most Southern state of our nation (Northern Hemisphere folks, please realise this is the state nearest to Antarctica).

After getting out of my pyjamas last Wednesday :) I got a bit of a prune on my hair.  I went from this

to this

I hosted a dinner for 12 at my house...ummm it was delicious!  On the menu was Drunken Teryaki Roast Lamb with roast vegetables and mini raspberry cheese cakes with raspberry sauce and berry sorbet and a few vino's to finish it off and perhaps to start it as well.

By the way if you are interested in getting your dinners organised or some new recipe's don't forget to check out my new page Healthy Eats for Teachers.  I will be adding some weekly menus and organisation when I head back to school next week.

I put up this little freebie for you all!  It is a 5 senses poem template we did in out last week of school. The one we did at school was not as cute as this because the idea quickly jumped in my head when I was trying to figure out what we could do in the last week.  Oh I also accidentally printed off 241 copies of the ugly 5 Senses template because I forgot to delete the 1 when I was printing from my computer.....there goes my photocopy budget for the next term.  Seriously....gone.
Just click on the pic below to get your FREE copy!

Had a lovely lunch with some of the gals from school, so nice to catch up without rushing past each other or moving along in the photocopy line (which you won't see me in next term).

Anyway I just thought I would catch you up with what has been happening (or not happening), the rest of the week will see us up at our Conservation Block clearing gorse!

Poetry in Action

The last couple of days we have been talking about verbs in our Grade 2 class.  To help the students understand and to demonstrate that they could understand we made individual lists of verbs and then used this list to create a poem about a noun (which we have explored over the last couple of weeks).

Now I forgot to take photos so I am just going to type out a few that I can remember.  So the structure of it went like this;

The (noun) is
verb,
verb,
verb,
verb,
verb.

Complex, I know :)  The point of this lesson was to see if students could use verbs not necessarily write creative and imaginative poetry...but you know what I got both!  The kiddos were told they had to create an image of a journey in a person's mind, this is just a couple of my favourites

The arrow is                The cockroach is
spinning,                   surviving,
turning,                    crawling,
flying,                     eating,
landing,                    choking,       
hitting                     dying.

              The gymnast is
              running,
              flipping,
              twisting,
              landing,
              smiling.

I just loved how they came out and they really were able to create imagery in my head as I read them.  The other thing that I loved about this lesson is that it was quick and easy but also got them past the thinking that poetry had to rhyme.

We also had a huge maths games session!  I love to just get a bunch of games out that I will want them to be playing this term independently.  So I got out some old and new games that focussed on number, place value, odd and even numbers and friends of 10.  Here are a few pics

These  pics show my Build a Butterfly to 10 and 20 packet

These next 2 pics are an ooooolllldd game that I made years ago but the kids still love it!  It practices the skill of adding to 10 and is called Rainbow Facts to 10.  I remade it just for TpT, you can check it out here

This is another one that I remade for TpT so you could all enjoy it as well!  It is One Before Bingo and the kiddos really have to think about what number they put their marker on.  One thing I did differenlty for the file on TpT was make it Before and After Bingo so the number line reflects numbers 0 -21. You can take a look here

I still like to use the games I made years ago if I can, but there are quite a few I have updated.
For my next post I have a really cool art activity we have just finished!  Thanks for sticking with this longer than intended post :)

Winter landscapes

Here are the Winter landscapes my kids did today.  We used water paints for the sky, a watered down coffee mixture as the land and a brown ink for the trees, (the white represents snowa).  I dripped the ink and the kiddos used straws to blow the ink around to create their leafless trees.  Very abstract I thought, but they had lots of fun and I know this because they had lots of mess to clean up (:  We are going to publish our Winter acrostic poems tomorrow and then display them with our paintings.  Can't wait.