It's Friday! It's Friday! It's Spring Break! It's Spring Break!

Do you do anything special with your peanuts to celebrate making it through another week together? We do a Friday Dance every Friday after we get into line to go home. It's possibly the easiest song and dance in the world. Are you ready? You sing " It's Fri-day! It's Fri-day! It's Friday!"  while holding your pointer fingers in the air and moving them up and down. ( We also have a version for when school ends on a Thursday or Wednesday like it did this week.) So go back and read the title and imagine me singing it and doing a little dance. And then another dance of joy because I am officially on Spring Break!! :)
 
So, here I am linking up with TEACHING MADDENESS and DOODLEBUGS TEACHING to share about our week.
 
 
This week we took all of the 2nd grade peanuts to a place called Frederik Meijer Gardens. They do a live butterfly exhibit every year during March and April. It is so much fun. It is inside this humongous green house. This is pretty much what it looks like through the whole thing. It's amazing!

 

They have different areas for you to learn about butterflies like this little house where you can see them hatching!

 

As you walk around butterflies are flying all around and you can see them THIS close up.

Gorgeous isn't she?



 Sometimes they even land on you, which always SO cool when it happens for the peanuts. I wish I could show you the picture I took of this little peanuts face when this one landed on her...Priceless!

 And, sometimes they don't land on you at all. This poor peanut tried SO hard the whole time we were there to get one to land on her...The little girl in the above picture had TWO land on her while we there...And this little one didn't have any. I'm sure it was quite a sight to see me excited for the one and trying to console the other one. It was a good lesson for both of them.

There was also this really cool Simple Machines exhibit that we went to as well. Here is one of the peanuts trying out the pulleys.

#2 One of my favorite blogs is Little Miss Organized. EVERY time I go to check out her blog I find something new to incorporate into my class...and in easy ways too. One of the things she posted about last week was how she organizes her writing lessons. It was a great post and you can check it out HERE One of the things she talked about was using brain food to motive her writers. In her words " if you're not writing you don't need snack cause your brain isn't working to need it. If you are writing, then your brain needs energy. So I better feed it." 

We NEEDED to finish up these research reports that we have been working on for FOREVER so I prepped them Wednesday and told them we would be writing for a long time the next day but that I would have a treat for them. I told them pretty much the same thing Amy told her kiddos. It worked GREAT! I didn't hear a single complaint over how long they were writing for ( over an hour for some of them!)

 Side note: I love the potential of this writing piece. I was happy to see the spacing and capitals and periods since some of peanuts are still struggling with that. But I love the great mini lessons we can have that I see in this piece. We can work on choosing different sentence starters and compound sentences.   I can't wait to revise this piece with him....and revising is not my favorite thing.

#3 I snapped a picture of these two peanuts actually using the resources in our room to spell something. It made my heart so happy. Sitton Spelling is the program we use for spelling at my school. There are a list of about 160 words that are commonly used in 2nd grade writing and those are the words they practice spelling all year long. They go on our word wall after we have seen them but I have the full list on my objectives board.

 #4 We did a fun measurement activity this week. We were learning how to measure using feet and inches. I had a few kiddos lay down around the room. Then I taped off where their head and feet were.

After that I grouped the peanuts and they practiced measuring their friends and writing the amount using feet and inches. Then they reported out to their classmates. I didn't put the person they were measuring in any of the groups in case they already knew how tall they were.

#5 This is my favorite out of all my things I have to share. I was gone at PD twice last week. When I am gone I leave a writing prompt for the kiddos to work on instead of trying to explain where we are in our writing to a sub. I found this cute writing prompt on TPT. You can get it HERE. I got some really cute, quality writing  out of my peanuts on this piece. But this one I just loved SO much that I had to share. :)

( Just in case you can't read it very well it says: When I grow up I want to be a teacher. I want to be that because my mom did it. And I want to be like Mrs. Robinson. because she is the best teacher ever! And I even have to teach to make sure the kids learn and make sure that they are in a safe and healthy learning environment.)

 

 

Ok, does that not just melt your heart!! What a thing to come back to after being gone all day. I am going to be making a copy of that one to save for a long time.

 

If you haven't yet, go check out Jenny over at Suntans and Lesson plans. She is having a 100 follower giveaway that I am a part of.  This may be THE cutest giveaway button I have EVER seen. :)

 

 

Well, that is all for me. I'll be checking back in tomorrow to share my Spring Break bucket list. Happy Friday!