Let's Eat an Insect!

WHAT!?!?!?  I bet that title got your attention didn't it???  Well, I'll get to the yummy insect in just a minute, but in the meantime look what else we did . . . .

Since we spent Monday talking about St. Patrick's Day, we only had four fun days of insects.  That was okay because we packed a lot into those four days!  We have a REALLY big day coming up in May.  It is our annual Art Show and each month I try and save a very special piece of artwork to display.  For the month of March, we made our "name bug".

SORRY, I have no ideas why this picture is sideways.

 

I know it may be hard for some of you to believe but, yes my students actually wrote their own names!  If you closely you will see that my sweet Sara has a little trouble with her "S" so I make little "dots" for her to follow.  Her S's have some a long way since September and I am sure in another month or so she will no longer need the dots!

 

We spent Wednesday talking about butterflies.  We fluttered and flew all over the place.  By the way, being a butterfly is a wonderful way to walk down the hallway.  After all, butterflies don't make any sounds!  We topped off our day by making some beautiful "squishy" butterflies.

 

The secret to these little beauties is a lot of paint!  The children glob large spoonful's of paint onto one half of the butterfly.  Next, we fold him and squish!  I love to see the children's faces when paint starts oozing out.  We open them up to see a lovely butterfly.  After they dry, we add his/her body and antennas.  The children draw on their own faces and our fluttery friends are ready to go!

All week long we talk about the anatomy of an insect (you know, 3 body parts, 2 eyes, 6 legs, 2 antennas) and on Thursday, we made our very on insects.

 Everyone got to paint their egg cartons any color they wanted.  The children added their own legs and antennas and of course we added some left over sticker eyes.  The each child decorated their insect with different shapes. 

 

Ahhh . . . finally it was our "Fabulous Fun Friday"!  This would be our last day before Spring Break so I wanted it to be very special.  I said "special" right?  Not messy??  Well, guess what?  We got both!  We spent Friday talking about bees!  It was so fun.  Everyone got to "buzz" around the room and up and down the halls.  (Not as quiet as butterflies, but fun no less!)  We even made our very own bees to take home!  First we taped off some yellow construction paper for our stripes.

 

 

Here comes the fun part!  Next, we painted.

 

We stripped off the tape to reveal some very special bumble bees! 

Don't you just love the wax paper wings?

 

Friday means fun in the kitchen so we buzzed and flew down the hall for some science and cooking fun.  Since I had been teasing everyone about "eating an insect", I knew I better start with that!  Here they are . . . .

 

 

That's right, they are made with bananas, pretzels and chocolate chips.  If you closely, you will hopefully notice that they are anatomically correct.  Each insect has 3 body parts, 6 legs and 2 antennas.  Oh, a few actually have "stingers" :)  They were very yummy!

Hang on, I'm not finished . . . . next we talked about our wonderful friends, the bumble bees and how they help our gardens.  We used Cheetos to serve as our pollen.

 

Then we wiped our hands and pretended to be bumble bees spreading the pollen.

 

 



Of course after all of this we were thirsty.  Finally, we drank our lemonade like butterflies!

 

Butterfly's tongues are like straws,  We cut our straws in half and pretended to be butterflies drinking nectar from a flower.

WOW, what a busy week!  I think I NEED a vacation to recharge my batteries. 

Thanks for visiting with us.  I hope you check on us again!

St. Patrick's Day 2014

 

HAPPY ST. PATRICK'S DAY everyone!  Even if you aren't Irish, it is fun to pretend!  Today we made these cute little leprechaun hats.  Everyone loved cutting out their our rainbow strips.  

Our letter of the week is "I" so we also ate green ice cream!  And by the look on everyone's faces it was very YUMMY!

 
I hope you all wore green so you didn't get pinched!  And I hope you all stop back by, we will be talking about INSECTS this week!  FUN!!!

Just a Bunch of Tubes

Last week, during our Dr. Seuss week, I had this "great idea" to do something with empty paper towel and toilet tissue rolls.  You know those lovely tubes that "you just can't throw away".  I have everyone collecting these for me so I have quite a large supply.  Alas, my "great idea" just never came to be.  There were so many other things that I wanted to do that week so I crammed all the empty cardboard tubes into my closet for another day.  Well, this past week I was in the mood for something different.  Right after lunch on Wednesday I pulled out my stash and dumped it on our tables.  I had already punched holes into each end of all the tubes (I know, but it was a great way for me use up some nervous energy) and added some chenille sticks (better know to us old folks as "pipe cleaners") and stepped back.  OH MY GOODNESS, we had fun!!!

Can you see the look on the little boy's face in the stripped shirt?
He just realized how to connect the tubes so they would not fall apart!

 

Of course for the first few minutes I heard, "what do we do?" and "I can't!" but soon those negative comments turned into "LOOK Mrs. Karen!".  I knew they were having fun!  I loved watching my sweet "S" when she realized how to bend the pipe cleaners so that the tubes would stay together.  That was all it took!  Soon everyone was busy building their very own sculptures.  By the way, I knew this was really fun when I announced that it was time to get ready for our playground time and no one wanted to go!  I hope you try this and if you do, please let me know how it goes. 

Dr. Seuss Week!

WOW!  I do believe this was the greatest week EVER at school.  Okay, maybe not THE greatest, but I bet it was in the top 10!  Over the past several weeks the weather in central Alabama has been crazy.  Like most of the country, we have had a lot of snow AND ice.  Unlike most of the country, the people of central Alabama cannot function very well in snow and ice, so we have missed a lot of school.  But, this past week we were actually in school for 5 consecutive days, so we had fun talking about the wonderful Dr. Seuss! 

We started our unit by reading one of my all time favorite books, My Many Colored Days.  Of course everyone has to tell me their favorite color so after we read our book, we made our very own "colored day" project.

 

I'm not sure if you can tell by the pictures, but the background has different shades of colors.  We also used a lot of our "fun" paint brushes (i.e. scrubbers, rollers, craft sticks, scrappers, etc.).  This project is fun because the children always talk about their "favorite" color while painting.

 

Tuesday is a day reserved for our BIG projects.  We started our day by reading 10 Apples Up On Top.  Some of Dr. Seuss' books are long but my class didn't mind.  We all would squeal with excitement when we recognized words that rhyme.  Our art project for the day was very special.  First, we wrote the numbers one through ten on little apples cut from our wonderful Ellison machine.  Then we glued down a picture of ourselves and put those little apples right on top of our heads!

 

 

The end results were so fun and BIG!

 



Everyone loved carrying them home because they were "the biggest picture ever" (yes, that is a quote from precious little "S"!).

 

The next book we read was Horton Hears a Who.  I was really worried about the length of this book, but once again my class surprised me.  Everyone giggled when I changed voices with each character and again, they squealed when they heard words that rhymed.  Our project for the day was simple but fun.  We always have a fun day when we get out the scissors.  We cut our clover field and added little blossoms. 

 

Next, everyone cut out a stem for their clover and glued on their favorite color blossom. 

 

 



 I think everyone did a great job.

 

On Thursday we read a book that most of the class had not heard of, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back .  I think this was our favorite book (so far!) and we had fun putting together our very own "Cat in the Hat".

 

 

Of course, this project was BIG too, but no one seemed to mind!

 

We also had a very special snack on Thursday.  We read the book Green Eggs and Ham and made our very own!  I was afraid one little girl was going to cry when I said we would be eating green eggs but when she realized what we were doing, she came around.  First we made some good 'ole vanilla pudding, then we added green food coloring to it.

 

We started stirring . . . .

We dumped it on our plates . . . .

 

and added a yummy  Nilla Wafer . . . 

Super fun Green Eggs and Ham!

 

Our Fabulous Fun Friday came all too soon!  We started our day by reading The Cat in the Hat and as you can imagine, it was now our favorite!  We all loved Thing One and Thing Two!  They made us giggle, so we made our very own Thing One and Thing Two hair!!!   It was easy, we cut strips of light blue constructions paper

 

and well . . . see . . .

Aren't we cute?????

 

 



We wore them to eat our Dr. Seuss birthday cake which I did not take pictures of, sorry!  But it looked just like the one I did last year . . .

It isn't very fancy but everyone said it tastes really good!

We didn't have time on Friday to read all of Bartholomew and the Oobleck but we did spend some time looking at it and talking about oobleck.  Then we HAD to make our own oobleck, right???  Of course. 

At this point our day got really messy!  We had cornstarch ALL over the kitchen and ourselves.  But we had fun and that was all that mattered.

Thank you for visiting with us.  I hope you stop back again next week, we will be talking about the farm and all the wonderful animals who live there.