St. Patrick's and The Lorax

Just a couple of simple activities I wanted to share, because the results were so precious...

I had the children trace a shamrock on green paper and write a sentence about why they are lucky. I say this a lot, but seriously, I melted.

....because I get to snuggle with mom

...because I have friends/...because I have God

....because my Dad protects me

...because I have my Miss Brown (biiiig smile from me)!

Moving on to our Lorax art!

For these paintings, we looked at a page from the book and taked about the landscape. Then, we used oil pastels to make the truffula tree trunks, stripes on the trunks and tree tops. Then, students used liquid water color to paint the sky, ground, and lake.

To make the little truffula trees, students cut out a trunk from construction paper and again used oil pastels. They then cut out a circle and glued it to the trunk. They chose one color of feathers to create the tops of the truffula trees.







This is the adorable way the kinder teacher next door to me put together her Lorax bulletin board using the truffula trees described above. Isn't it the cutest thing you've ever seen!?

officially obSEUSSed

As many of you are, my kinders and I have been enjoying ourselves some Dr. Seuss! I have to say, I am blown away by the way he is able to present topics that are quite complex in a fun, childlike way. If I were teaching fifth grade, I would be using The Lorax to teach about supply and demand! Buuuut that's not quite a K concept. So, we instead enjoyed a reading of The Lorax to lead into a discussion about wants and needs. Wow, my babies amaze me. We found ourselves in a friendly debate about whether or not a friend is a want or a need. "Friends are a want because you can live without them," one says, to which another replies, "But you need them so you won't be lonely." On we went, with a class discussion that's still making me smile. Anyway, here's the sheet we used to record our wants vs. needs.

This little guy decided that friends fall in the needs category, along with his heart, food and water. On the wants, he has a galaxy tab (??), pizza, to be the king of the world, and a new hamster. How precious is this? Let's look at another one, because they're so darn cute!

This little one's wants include: a baby frenchie, no tornadoes, a fox, and a sister. Her needs are trees, animals, heart and God. I'm melting. I have been trying to figure out where I got this page... please let me know if you know so I can link back! Thanks.

We also made Thing 1 and Thing 2 word families:

I freehanded tracers (can you tell!?) for them to use in making their things. They wrote
"-ing" word family words all over their thing with white colored pencil (except my little friend there who wrote in black). They then wrote a sentence about their thing using a couple of their word family words.

On a waaayy late note, here is our President's Day fabulousness:

[If I were president, I would make more video games. I would make Jesus come back.]

Inside Lincoln's hat! [I would stuff my hat with my pony because I love her]