Five for Friday: May 8

Another week down!

I’m back to link up with Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching to share five things from my week! 🙂

and I’m also linking up with Teaching Blog Addict for Freebie Friday.

You can find the freebies under 2 and 3.

We introduced new play dough mats!

These alphabet play dough mats have been a huge hit and a great support for the kids who need it.

This is a free download from This Reading Mama!

Our caterpillars are growing so fast!

We have been making observations every day.

Here is what are observation table looks like most days.

Magnifying glasses, caterpillar/butterfly books, pencils, crayons, observation sheets, hanging folders (to keep their observation sheets/book covers in) and mini cubes to measure the caterpillars with.

Mid week my ECE partner transferred the caterpillars over to the net with the kids.

They were so excited to watch her!

Click on the image below if you would like to check out the butterfly observation and other printables in my TPT store 🙂

We are still working hard on mastering addition and subtraction!

We practiced with these addition and subtraction sticker stories this week.

Click here to grab the template for free!

We made this craft for our mom’s this week!

I got the idea from Food, Love & Life.

This is my sample.

And we did a directed drawing and drew our moms.

They drew in pencil, I outlined it for them with a Sharpie and then they coloured it in with crayon.

Then I glued them onto manila folders and laminated them for durability.

Here is my sample…

And these are by the kids!

We put our flower craft inside and sent them home!

I hope the moms love them!

One area of focus for our team for the next 2 months is problem-solving and supporting students through solving open-ended and higher-order thinking questions.

We decided on several different questions to try and here is the first one.

First I did this activity with them whole group.

I did an example then I had some students come up and create a pattern with pattern blocks for me. Then I drew their pattern and we circled the core and labelled the pattern together.

Then students were able to try these prompts at centre time.
Here is an amazing one that one of my kiddos made.

At first I told him, “remember we are solving the problem not just building!” To this he replied I did solve the problem! It’s an ABABCB pattern and the second shape is a yellow hexagon!”

!!!

I looked closely and realized he was right.
What a creative thinker! I was blown away!
(Although he missed the “using 10 pattern blocks” part of the instructions.. but I let that fly since I was so impressed with his creativity!)

I had some of my kids try a similar but different problem and record their ideas as well.