Fun in the Sun!

Summer vacation is just around the corner and you might be wondering what you can do with the kids while they are at home. Well, have no fear, one of the blogs I love created a list of 67 things to keep kids occupied this summer!

I Can Teach My Child!

 

Celebrity Story Saturday- Lost in Spice

I'm late getting to post today, but here is another Celebrity Story Saturday to add to our amazing collection!

This past Tuesday we at the Hills were blessed to have a guest reader visit our class. Ms. Catherine is a friend of one of our ESOL teachers and she was excited about coming to read to General Delk's Army. Of course, we had to get her to read for the blog!

Since we have been doing author studies, we chose a book that went along with our topic.

Skippyjon Jones: Lost in Spice!!

Part 1

 Part 2

 

Thank you, Ms. Catherine for coming to visit our class! You're welcome back anytime!

 

Field Day 2013

Once again we were visited by Chattanooga Christian School!

We love that they have adopted us as their service project! We started at 8:50, and 3 hours later we were wiped out! Needless to say, it was a success.
 :)

Here are some pictures and videos from the different stations.

Musical Chairs

Basketball

Hula hoop and jump rope

Dance and freeze

3-legged race

50 yard dash

Clothes relay

Tug-o-war

Soccer bowling

This isn't a complete list. I didn't get pictures of everything. There were 16 stations total and my students were worn out by the end. (perfect!)

Thank you CCS for once again creating a fun atmosphere for our students!

Planting a Mystery Garden

 This science experiment started innocently enough. All I wanted was to irritate my husband. Honestly, it doesn't take that much. You see, we have a garden in our backyard. My husband has built 40 raised garden beds for his gardening projects. Tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, squash, zucchini, lettuce, berries, you name it and my husband grows it!

Here are some pictures from last year's garden:

My husband is showing my mom the garden.

Here's my daughter showing off her sunflowers.

This year, wonder of wonders, my husband has allowed me to have one garden bed. That's right. Out of 40, he has allowed me 1. How gracious of him.

Now my hubby is completely OCD when it comes to his garden. Every bed is planned out to perfection and each seed is given it's time to germinate on our growing table before being planted in it's garden home. What could I do to shake him up a bit?

I could find a seed so obscure that it would throw him into a tizzy! So, I went online and found this site:

Bountiful Gardens!

Not only to they specialize in seeds of all kinds, all the seeds are heirloom, which means you can harvest the seeds from the plants you grow to use the next season! Score!

So  I went to the Seed Mixes section and found the PERFECT mix of seeds for my evil plan... the KID MIX! It's a random mix of seeds from the previous season- in other words, you don't know what you're going to get! Veggies, fruits, or flowers? Who knows!? And what could be more annoying to an OCD gardener than having a mystery garden?!

The best part is that the seed packets are so cheap- just 50 cents! I bought 4 packets. I wanted my (personal) kids to get in on the action, and I wanted to share the fun with my students as well.

The Mystery Garden

I let my students in on my evil gardening plan and they thought it was hilarious. When I told them I wanted us to plant some mystery seeds, they were thrilled! We started by watching a short Curious George video called Seed Trouble. 

It's about George having to sort seeds using their attributes- size, shape, color. I wanted my students to have to do the same thing. I gave each team a small amount of seeds from one of the seed packets. (there were a ton of seeds in that packet!) They were to examine the seeds and sort them into groups according to their attributes. Once they were sorted, my students had to label them as being vegetable, fruit, or flower seeds.

After sorting, students chose 4 seeds (of the same kind) and came to my table. Last season I made a binder of all the different seeds my husband used in his garden. My students used the binder to see if they could identify their seeds.

It took me 2 hours, but the binder is worth it! Do you know my crazy husband had 14 types of tomatoes?

 Showing off the seeds they chose

 Going through the binder to guess what they have

 They labeled their cup with their name and their guess 

Time to plant! Dirt, seed, more dirt, water!

Only time will tell what our mystery garden will grow! Some of the seeds were easy to label since I had some matching seeds in my binder. However, the seed mix was so extensive, we have some seeds planted that we couldn't identify! A true mystery!

 

Author Studies

For the next 3 weeks we are going to be looking at some of our favorite authors. It will be a fun way to end our year! Here are some of our favorite series/ authors:

Shel Siverstein

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Skippyjon Jones

by Judith Schachner

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Jon Scieszka

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Mo Willems

Author of the Pigeon books!

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Lane Smith

Author and illustrator

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Tomie dePaola

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Anna Dewdney

Author of the Llama Llama books!

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Patricia Polacco

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Kevin Henkes

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Cynthia Rylant

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Obviously, there are a ton of more fabulous authors, but we only have 3 weeks! Can you believe the year has gone by so quickly? 

Here's my question: 

Which author or illustrator would you like to research? 

Leave your answer in the comments section!

It's TCAP time in Tennessee!

This past Friday we held our annual TCAP pep rally! Ms. Harris really outdid herself in preparing songs for each grade level. Since I was the MC, I was unable to get video. Mrs. Vinnie took videos with her ipad and as soon as I figure out how to get them on here, I will!

Here is one thing from the pep rally I can share- a music video! Ms. Harris and our 5th grade choir wrote, directed, featured in, and produced an awesome video for our students. I've never seen our students as a whole pay so much attention as they did for this video.

* This video was made with one of the ipads we got with our technology grant!*

It's just around the corner!

It's TCAP time again! That would be the Tennessee standards based test that students take at the end of the year, for anyone who doesn't know. In a few years everything will be Common Core based, but until then we keep taking the same ole' TCAP test.

For the past 4 weeks we at the Hills have been preparing our students by doing in-depth Boot Camp practice on specific strategies and standards. I have been focusing on the Language Arts standards. I haven't taken a lot of pictures lately, but this week I managed to get out my camera.

Here are some pics of students getting to practice their comprehension of synonyms and antonyms by working together on some centers.

I know I've enjoyed seeing all the 3rd grade students these past 4 weeks, but I gotta admit.... I miss just having my kiddos! Just one more day of Boot Camp, then next week is testing. We can do it!!