Last Minute St. Patty's Day

Hope you all are having a fantastic week.

It's almost Friday (just a few more house for us)!

Since St. Patty's Day is just around the corner, we thought we'd share a few last minute St. Patrick's Day activities with you all. This week has been crazy busy for us. Having a snow day on Tuesday really made us make some adjustments in our schedule,

but we were still able to plan several activities from our

St. Patricks's Day Pack O'Fun and plan on incorporating several more next week!

If you're interested in checking out our St. Patricks's Day Pack O'Fun,

it's on sale now through Sunday for 20% off!

A few activities included in our pack can be used with

Leprechaun on the Loose.

Leprechaun on the Loose By: Marcia Thornton Jones

There are a few places in this story that are great for having students make predictions. One place would be right as Sydney is going into the classroom and heading to the art area. This is a great spot to ask your students to predict what they think Sydney is going to do next.

Another great stopping place for making predictions is when Sydney is faced with the challenge of letting the leprechaun loose or keeping him trapped.

Below, is a generic St. Patrick's themed prediction page that will work great with this story, or another St. Patrick's Day story that you might have.

Just click the picture of the clovers if you'd like a copy!

Here's a mosaic leprechaun we'll be making tomorrow with our kiddos:

These always turn out so cute every year!

You can find the directions by clicking on the picture below.

You can get the pattern {HERE}

We hope all of you have a fabulous Friday!

We'll be back in a few days with some water cycle & weather resources that we just love!

Gobble, Gobble!

We promised that we'd share some of our turkey art projects with you all and let me tell you our kiddos just loved them. Anytime we get out the watercolors or do any sort of art project, we've got all sorts of creativity happening throughout our classrooms!

This simple art project always turns out soooo cute!







We have our students trace their hands, cut them out, and glue them on a piece of construction paper. Next they draw legs, cut out a wattle and beak, and glue on a googley eye. Next comes their favorite part. They add feathers using their watercolors! You would not believe the silence in our rooms when the watercoloring begins, it's AMAZING!
We also have a cute little poem for you all that our kids glue on the back of this page. This poem is all over the web! We also added a few lines after the poem because we have our students write, "I am thankful for..."



You can get the poem and paper {Here}



This next turkey activity is something we found a few years ago somewhere online, but can't remember where. This is an adorable activity using scrapbook paper. We gather several sheets of fall toned scrapbook paper (reds, oranges, yellows, browns, maybe some greens) and cut it into 3x4 inch rectangles. Each child will get 5 of these rectangles. We then print sheets of the turkey body on brown construction paper, the wattle on red, and beaks on orange (download below). We use scraps of white for the eyes, or google eyes, whichever you prefer. For the feathers, we print out several sheets on a very thick cardstock to be used as a pattern {enough for 1 pattern for every 1-2 students}. Kids pick 5 different colored rectangles, and trace the pattern on the back of the scrapbook paper. After cutting out the pieces of the turkey, they glue them together and voila! A cute little detail you can add is before you glue the wattle to the body, crinkle it up first. It looks a little bit more like a wattle then. Also, don't forget to fold the beak in half.


Get your copy of the Turkey parts {HERE}.

We use this along with a "I'm thankful for..." writing and add it to a placemat that we've woven, laminated, and it becomes their Thanksgiving placemat.

Get your copy of the "I'm thankful for..." paper {HERE}.

We are actually doing this on Thursday, so we don't have any pics of the placemat yet, but we wanted to share just in case you still need a few last minute turkey ideas for your class. We hope this is useful for you!

Cloud Art/Writing Activity

This week we have been busy learning about clouds. One art/writing activity that we do every year with our first graders is an activity that incorporates Little Cloud by Eric Carle.

We give each of our students a piece of blue construction paper and they paint the entire paper with white paint. Then they create designs in the paint using their paintbrush, a toothpick, or a Q-tip. The following day we read Little Cloud by Eric Carle and then have a discussion about the shapes that little cloud turned into. Eventually our students create their own clouds out of their painted paper and complete a writing about their cloud. We save our students' large scraps each year so other students can cut out pieces the following year if needed. See one of our examples below. We thought you might enjoy a copy of the writing. Our students begin the writing with, "My little cloud turned into..." Click HERE for a copy of the writing page if you are interested!

Along with clouds and weather, we've also been talking about the water cycle. HERE is a fun video/song we share with our students. HERE are also a few songs from Teacher Tube that we have typed up for our students to practice.