Another Friday, Another Link Up

 

Happy Friday friends! I hope you all had a good week. I am back to link up again with DOODLEBUGS TEACHING and TEACHING MADDENESS to share about our weeks. I am doing this from the comfort of my own home because....dun, dun, dun...We have another snow day! ( If you are counting, this is number 8, and I think we may be in making this up territory...yikes!) But for now, I am living in the moment and enjoying my day off with my peanut.

 

My BIGGEST news is that I now have a BUTTON for my blog. I am so happy and excited. My husband's friend is a computer whiz and he figured out how to do it for me. So now when I link up I can have a cool picture like everyone else. :) So psyched!

 

On Monday I mentioned that I was bummed about not having my Boggle board done in time for Monday Made It. But that I was excited to bust out my personal laminator for the first time. This baby is UH-MAZING! I think I prefer the lamination on this one. It's much thicker than the one at school, which makes me feel like it will be WAY more durable. Unfortunately, I don't have the board done yet to share. I am still trying to figure out where it is going to go too!



 

Please ignore the horribley beat up t.v. tray and princess bear in this picture and just admire the beautiful laminator....OOOO...AAAHHH! :)

This week in writing we started our research report projects. I have the kid's choose a scholastic science vocabulary reader on a topic. We use this reader to kill many birds with one stone. Obviously, we use it for the research for our project. They also take an AR test on it, earning points, as well as use the book to talk about nonfiction text features. After writing their report they will then create a visual aide (poster) and write notecards for a presentation. The first year I did this I was SO impressed by their presentations that it has caused me to look forward to this project every year since then. This is possibly one of my favorite lessons.

This is one of my peanuts during our walk around. I spread the books around our tables and let them take 5 minutes to browse and chat with friends about what one they found interesting. They picked their first and second choice in topic. Then I called them after that to choose their book.

 

 

This week we started our forces, motion, and simple machines unit. I purchased a pack by Common Core and So Much More during the big TPT sale. You can get yours HERE. It is a great packet and I highly recommend it. During our unit we go sledding so the kiddo's can see force and motion in action. It's a lot of fun and its FREE. The high school right across the street from us has this large hill next to it. So we walk over and sled on it. The janitor's rope off a section of the parking lot so no one parks there, and we always have plenty of parents who help with crowd control. LOVE this day. :) 

 

After that we came back inside to enjoy some hot cocoa and cookies.

 BUT! The teacher in me couldn't JUST let them eat cookies and cocoa without something educational too. So we started another how-to writing project. ( So I can finally take the Christmas one's down! Ha!) They filled in their organizer while I got the cocoa ready.
I purchased this hot cocoa how to writing packet back during TPT Black Friday sales. I wanted to do it last month but between conferences and snow days we never got a chance. You can check it out HERE.
 

Well, that's all for my week. I need to finish cleaning up a little bit. We are having some of my husbands family over for pizza tonight. YUM! Have a great weekend everyone and go link up!