Gardening!

 Our theme this week was "Gardening" and it was the first week of our school's Summer Camp!! Who-hoo!

During summer camp, we always have a Yoga day where the school all together does a child centered yoga workout. The video we've been using is great because most of the poses are named after animals, like a lion... RAWR!

We also have splash day, where all the kids put on their bathing suits and we play outside in water tables and have a fun squiggly sprinkler to run through.

We read this week: My Garden by Kevin Henkes
                              Mortimer's First Garden by Karma Wilson
                              Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman 
                              Living Sunlight by Molly Bang
                              The Story of the Root Children by Sibylle von Olfers

Our question of the week was "What do you want in your garden?" This worked really well after reading the book "My Garden", because that's what the little girl talks about, flowers that can change color, chocolate bunnies, a jelly bean bush etc.

For our theme of the week, found worms outside and made them a habitat. We will observe them over the course of the summer and then put them back out in the woods in August. The kids really had fun digging for the worms! Here is a great step by step of what to do.

On TeachersPayTeachers I found a great FREE worksheet that not only makes a cool project, but really helps kids with those tricky teen numbers!

We planted seeds for flowers that hummingbirds will really like once they can go outdoors, and we watched a cool video about hummingbirds that talks about how they fly. It has great closeups of the birds. Worth a look!

We made hand print flower pictures.

Using toilet paper rolls, peanut butter and seed, we made bird feeders!

We played The Lady Bug game.

We wrote in our journals about what we would like to have in our own gardens.

 This summer we have some older kids on our class with us. While my kids are working on their journals, the older kids work on this reading log where they respond to the book we read in the morning.

And for Movie Friday we watched The Lorax! Yum, we had popcorn!!

Our song of the week was "Planting Time" (Row row row your boat), I found it here.

"Dig, dig, dig the earth (make digging motion)
Then you plant your seeds (pretend to drop seeds)
A gentle rain (Flutter fingers down)
And bright sunshine (Circle arms above head)
Will help your flowers grow."
(Hold one arm parallel to ground and move other arm up behind it with
fingers extended to represent a flower growing)

We had fun with all things outside this week!

I had a leaf nose! =]

The younger class grew grass this week! When it was all finished, they let us give it to the bunnies for a snack! =]

The games that we played this week at morning meeting were so fun!

We played "Alphabet Catch" with a beanbag. We toss the beanbag around the circle and the kids have to say the next letter in the alphabet. We started tossing it to the person next to use, once the kids get more comfortable with the game we'll stand in a circle and toss the beanbag across to friends.

"The Weather Changed" is a fun game. The kids decide on certain movements for weather, and we continually do the movements until the weatherman changes the weather. This week I started out as the weatherman, but I will have the kids be the weatherman too.

We played "1,2,3" which we have played before and is definitely a fan favorite! We stand in a circle and each child says 1,2 or 3 consecutive numbers starting with 1 up to 9. So for example: "1,2,3" "4" "5,6" "7,8,9" and the next child who would have to say 10 sits down and is out of the round. Then it starts back at one. My class really loves this one, and usually if we play it in the morning, I will hear them in centers or at their lunch tables playing their own facilitated versions of the game.

"Zoom" is a fun and quick game to play with a class of any age. First you need to pick a direction that the zoom is going to go around the circle. The person starting says zoom and turns their head the the person next, and it goes around the circle. Once the class gets comfortable with this game, I will record how long it takes us!

"Number Ball" is a lot like our alphabet catch in that we toss a beanbag to our friends. This game is a little different. The goal is to get to 30, but if the beanbag is dropped we have to start back at 1. I wonder if we will be able to get to 30 by the end of the summer?!

We are keeping up our work on our sight words! Every morning we go over around 10 of them. Once we've mastered them, they will go on our sight word wall! So exciting! We're working our way through the 220 Dolch sight word list.