English Word Work Review

It is hard to believe but the end is drawing near! A week and a half left!

This being said, each year at the end of the year I like to take some time to reflect with the kiddos on all we have learned. One of the tools I utilize to do this is the "My Spelling Reference Book" I have created to review all of the key word study patterns in English we have covered throughout the year. 

Each day for the last couple weeks of school we review a key concept and complete a page of our reference book. I tell the students they can then keep this book to utilize during the summer and in third grade as it now contains a smaller version of all those key anchors we created in class!

Here are some of the pages we completed this week!

You can get these and much more in my "My Spelling Reference Book" pack in my TpT store! Click on the image to check it out. Also, for those of you who are in a dual or bilingual room you can check out the Spanish equivalent "Mi Libro de Consulta de Ortografia" here. (We will be doing that one next week!)

Also, just for fun...our jam packed English wall that my kiddos used throughout the year as a resource- Take it in while ya can folks..down it comes tomorrow! I can't believe how time flies!

Plant Overload!

We are wrapping up our unit on plants this week and have had so much fun carrying our theme throughout all subject areas!

We wrote plant part cinquain poems to complete our "Poemas Es'plant'aculares" bulletin board for spring! 

I printed out several strips of paper each relaying one of the five main parts of a plant and placed them in a bin. Each student had to close his/her eyes and select one for their poem topic so we had a variety of all!

Here is one of their creations:

I got the cinquain writing paper from Cara Carroll here.

We also reviewed long e patterns this week through completing a hunt for "seed" words and "leaf" words. (I noticed after snapping this photo that my little one here left "seed" out of the dictation after the word "peach" which was a key link to the sort below!)

After writing the words it also led to a great discussion about how some do not follow the rules!

Grab yourself a copy of this activity with/without the dictation portion here.

We also continued our practice with finding area by creating and measuring plants! The students had to find the area of their flower, stem, and leaves!

Grab a copy of the measurement labeling sheet in English or Spanish here.

We continued by reading about those crazy "Meat Eating Plants" and then organized strips of sentences in order in groups to complete an organized retell/paragraph of this non-fiction text.

And...we also spent the week doing some fun exploration activities such as labeling the parts of flower...

Each group added the names to strips of paper and used push pins (post a safety discussion ;)) to place them where they belonged!

Finally we investigated how water moves through a stem. Day 1 we made our predictions as to what would occur, and Day 2 we followed up!

This stem investigation activity page among others we completed throughout our plant unit this month that are not pictured here are included in my "A Little Dirt Never Hurt" pack pictured below if you are looking for more activities!

It has been quite the "Plant"tastic past few weeks!

On a final note, my plant pack above, as well as all other items in my TpT store will be on sale tomorrow and Wednesday in honor of Teacher Appreciation week. If you have been waiting to purchase something- now is the time to do it folks ;)! Receive 28% total when you enter code: TAD13! 

Click on the link below or on my plant pack above to take you to my store! I'm looking forward to doing some serious shopping tomorrow too!

Open House, Animal Teeth, and other Random Things!

Linking up with Doodle Bugs for "Five for Friday Saturday"! I have a good excuse for being late though- we had Open House last night until 8pm...and if you all can imagine how it feels to be at school until 8pm...you can imagine my bed was the only place calling my name when I arrived home! 

So here goes...5 randoms from my busy week!

1. Alphabet Countdown - We started our annual "Alphabet Countdown" as a school on Tuesday. "A" was for "Show your Appreciation" to you teacher!

I love the "From one princess to another..." card. Too cute! (We are on "E" Monday!)

2.) We have been working on main idea/details all week. One of my students bought me the most adorable book at the book fair last week called "What if You had Animal Teeth?" which I thought would be perfect for practicing this concept.

Each kiddo created their own little "mouth/teeth" organizer to retell the important parts of the text!

3.) "Super Gallon Man" arrived to teach us all about equivalent units for capacity!

4.) We wrote acrostic poems for addition adjective practice!

(And to answer your question, no it is not a crack in his tooth, it is shining!)

You can grab a copy of the acrostic poem template here.

5.) And we set up our poems in our chairs and cleaned our room on Friday to prep for Open House that night!

I must say...they were the most well-behaved students I have ever had!

I even "hung out" for the evening at my guided reading chair to man the "class books" area ;)!

Feel free to check out other "Five for Fridays or Saturdays" and link up your own from the week!

May Currently!

Linking up with Farley @ Oh' Boy 4th Grade. 

Looking forward to seein' what you all have been up to as well!