Shared writing & five for Friday

1.  Shared writing=my new favorite thing.   During our insect unit last week, we read a cool nonfiction book about fireflies.  The kids finger painted yellow dots all over their papers, and after they dried, they went back to create firefly doodles around the dots--some we glued to the firefly shared writing poster, and some we added to our "firefly jar"!

2.  Ow/ou towers!  My kids have been loving our new geoblocks, and I needed a quick and easy literacy station activity.  I used a word page of ou/ow words from Cara Carroll's Out of Towners packet--(which is AWESOME for teaching ow/ou!), and taped them to the blocks.  At word work, a pair of students would take turns choosing a block to read.  If they read the word correctly, they could use it to create their ow/ou tower!  They loved this word work station so much, I kept it in the basket for this week, too!  

3.  Hermit crabs are *kinda* cool.  Each year during my ocean unit, I read A House for Hermit Crab by Eric Carle, and we always do the cool retelling pieces from Kim Adsit's Ocean Animals packet (love it)!  As you can see from the picture, I was in the middle of printing Kim's Ocean packet--ha!  Anyway, this year, my kids started asking questions about real hermit crabs--and to be perfectly honest, I don't know a THING about real hermit crabs.  I mean, I've seen the painted ones at the beach, and I know they live in a shell, but that's about it.  So, we ALL decided to do a little more research about these guys, and found out that they are pretty cool little creatures--so I made another sharing writing poster, so we could remember all the facts, and the kids created their own posters, too!

4.  Fish in a cup.  We read Swim! Swim!  (SO CUTE!!!)  I just love this book.  I bought clear plastic cups and blue pebbles from Dollar Tree, and had the kids draw their own "Lerch" the fish.  They made speech bubbles with quotes from the book to add to the cup, and some even added the girl fish, Dinah, that Lerch falls in love with at the end of the book.  

5.  {My sweet family!} My sister-in-law took amazing pictures of our entire family to give to my mom for Mother's Day.  We all met at a nearby park last Sunday.  It was FREEZING and cloudy, and we were worried we wouldn't be able to get a good picture--well, she is an amazing photographer and got the most beautiful pictures!  We gave them to my mom last night, and she cried!  So special.

I love these peeps.

Well, yet again, I am late to the party--one day I will actually post this on a Friday.  Promise.

  If you are a procrastinator like me, you can still link up with Doodle Bugs to share your five randoms from the week!  :)