I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover!

Hey All!

I hope everybody had a great St. Patrick's Day!  I can tell you my day was a LOT of fun!  But before I get to that, I want to share what the children were learning about at school for the week!  Being this our feast day, (my school's name is St. Patrick), we had to make sure school was done in style!  We started the week off with an intense amount of projects and ended our week with a field trip to go COSMIC BOWLING!

In honor of celebrating our feast day, we had a week long celebration of learning and fun! (Mostly fun!)

For art we painted 3 leaf clovers!


Another "food" project, we took a nice, juicy, yummy, pepper and sliced it.

Dipped it into white paint...

Then...we stamped it onto green paper!

Viola! There we have it! Shamrock art!

Originally we were going to hang these up around the room, but due to all the crazy events of the week, and with Easter in the horizon, it just didn't happen.  Maybe next year when Easter won't be the week after St. Patti's Day!


 And then we had centers...oh centers! Great times!
 
Centers were a LOT of fun to make this time around!  I did a word family sort with golden coins.  The children were able to pick the categories, which made this extra challenging and fun for them!  For the week, we practiced the difference between the long and the short "o" sound.

I also had the following word families to sort: -in, -en, -an, -old, -on, -ed and -at.

The kids did a great job doing this center on their own.  I felt that I finally got through to them in terms of sorting with word families! WOO HOO!!!

I picked up the buckets from JoAnns, special thanks to everybody who went around town to gather them for me...they were super cheap!  I advise going to JoAnns or the Dollar Tree to pick up those cute themed buckets for your centers.  They make them look like you put in a lot of effort when in reality you didn't! I know I am going to pick up some Easter buckets (AFTER Easter so I can get them cheaper!)


To practice graphing, I had a center for graphing Lucky Charms!  After all...they are magically delicious!

Except they were kinda messy...

And when I say kinda...I mean very messy!

 Next time, I am going to pull out all of the "non-marsh mellows" from the box so the children do not have to sift through them.  Better yet...isn't there a marsh mellow shape only cereal out there?  Nevertheless, I think it was a great foundation for practicing recording and displaying data.

Then there was the board game of total awesomeness...

I had a board game where students had to roll a die, move their coin onto the word and then say the word.  If they said the word, they got to keep a golden coin.  If they couldn't say the word, then the had to go back one space.  It was exciting to see how much the students learned over the course of the year!  They were able to identify several of the words from the game board.

The kids competed to play this game because they wanted to use the golden coins!

We also made patterend rainbows!

The kids made a mess of my room with the hole punches... but it was well worth it!  I taught them the name ROY G BIV to remember the colors of the rainbow.  We put the colors in the correct order using ROY G BIV and then stamped out a pattern to place on the rainbow.  The only downside with this project is the center took too long to do:( I had children coming back the next day to finish, instead of completing it within the 20 minute time frame I have carved out.  Next year, I would rather have this be an extra activity we do as a whole group.  That way we would get it all done at one time! (Instead of me cleaning it up every day!) I would also make more time for this project as well.

In Religion we talked about St. Patrick.  (I didn't make these, but they are too cool to keep a secret!) The kids made a St. Patrick Puppet using foam shapes!  

Isn't he cute?

And then we did writing projects!

Writing projects are difficult for me.  My favorite are sentence starters, because they get the kids to start building sentences.  My kiddos have come a long way from the beginning of the year and I want to keep pushing them so they are ready for first grade writing!  We work hard on sounding out all of the sounds and writing them down, as well as using our word and reading walls.  Now that the kids are reading it has gotten easier for them to write and use more words. 

So when I found this gem on Teacher's Pay Teacher's, which is my lifeline some weeks! (Maybe one day I'll learn how they make all of this super creative stuff look so freaking cute!) You can get your own copy of this project by clicking here.  Please DO NOT ask me for a copy!  I strongly advise you to check out her store...it has lots of goodies there!   The entire packet has multiple story starters! The two that I used are featured on this blog.  If Easter wasn't this week, I would have done yet another writing prompt! But there is always next year!

Please support talent and skill and go check it out!  This creation was made by "Just Wild About Teaching."  You can check out her blog by clicking here.  There are tons of great resources on her blog so please check it out!   I just spend about 25 minutes reading and oogling over it (instead of trying to do cool things for my room! Whoops, 25 minutes just came and went!)

The kids LOVE to do art and I WANT them to do more writing!  So this awesome art/writing project was the perfect thing! Dianne, our aid did all the cutting and we did the assembling! The children kept trying to find their work on the bulletin board.  This was their best writing project to date.   After doing this project, I am inspired to try some different art/writing projects.  

As for MY St. Patrick's Day...I spent it in an insane amount of Easter/Holy Week Rehearsal.  Silly Holy Week HAD to be right after St. Patti's Day! I had Easter rehearsal in the AM, followed by playing music at church with choir, followed by Holy Week Music Practice at I.C, then going to take a small cat nap, followed by going to Old Saint Joe's for mass!  Brittany and Brigid joined me at St. Joe's, so it ended up being a small (good) Music Min reunion!  Very heartbreaking to see my old musical stomping grounds diminish in number.  There were a grand total of 7 people in choir, including the director, accompanist and 3 graduates who don't come on a frequent basis! I was also saddened by the random roped off areas of the church.  (Doesn't "All Are Welcome" ring a bell to ANYBODY these days?)  I was happy to see Eileen, Father Sal, Jennifer (aka The Fox) and some old parish employees!

And did I mention...even though I had my shoes...there was NO ORGAN!?!?!?!?  WHAT!?!?!  Who does that!?!?!? 

After mass the five of us went to Cafe Expresso for an ole' fashioned dinner.

Brittany, Joe, Myself, Brigid and Zaccary at Expresso.

It was a great week!  I hope yours was fantastic too!

<3
Em

Afterwards,