Dinosaur Writiing (Freebie!) & a Dilemma

On Friday we finished writing about dinosaurs, and I thought I would share some samples of our work, as well as the paper we used:

 This little guy decided to make his dinosaur look more like a dragon since it's name means "Dragon King". You can see he started out writing very small, because he wanted to make sure he had enough room for everything. He looked up his dinosaur in one of our non-fiction books and found out some facts about it which he incorporated into his writing!

 This little girl focused more on the actual activity - she's not much into dinosaurs but she did like the excitement of trying to get the skull out of the ice. You can see that she's still starting her sentences with "And" so that's something I need to improve next year.

 This little guy quoted facts from one of the books I read aloud - glad to see he was paying attention!

 This darling snuck her work into the "done" pile without coming to me for editing - which is alright since now you can see what an unedited piece of writing looks like in my class :) I think her 5th sentence is supposed to read "When dinosaurs die they leave fossils." I think this isn't bad for an unedited piece of work!

This little darling was a bit all over the place but I love that she thinks her sister is very intelligent! I can clearly hear her "voice" in this piece. The hearts on her i's are a new thing, not sure where she came up with that!

Alright, if you'd like the dinosaur writing papers, just click here to download them for free in my TPT store! I also found a new book at yesterday that I will be adding to this unit. It's hilarious and I am totally going to be making activities that go with it, so look for those this summer!

 

Alright, on to my dilemma.Here are a few pictures of it:

View from the front of the sink, cubbies and tons of cabinets!

 Window wall - look at those shelves!

 The cabinets at the end of the cubbie wall - look how much storage space there is! Everything could have it's own space and be tucked away neatly out of sight so no more clutter!

 View of the back wall - this room is huge! A SmartBoard will take up some of that whiteboard space once it's installed, but the bulletin boards on either side would still be free.

View of the front of the room - more whiteboard space! That would be perfect for a word work area I'm thinking!

Alright, so what's the dilemma? This room is mine..if...I agree to teach 1st grade again next year! Talk about holding out a carrot in front of me! Of course I want this gorgeous, huge, new room! But, do I want it enough to give up on teaching Kinder next year? I absolutely love teaching Kinder and I missed it so much this year, but teaching 1st wasn't all bad. I think that if I teach it again next year I might like it more since I am more prepared and have a better idea of what I'm doing. The main reason I wasn't crazy about teaching 1st is because I felt like I was behind the whole year (I got switched to it the day before school started so I never felt prepared) and I felt like I didn't do as good a job for my firsties as a more experienced 1st grade teacher would have (not that we actually have any of those hanging around, most people in our building are relative newbies like me anyways!),

So, do I agree to teach 1st again next year and get this fabulous room (oh the ideas I have for setting it up!) or do I stay in my perfectly fine if slightly shabby room and teach my adorable Kinders again?! My husband is advising me to go with the new room because I know what I'm doing (mostly!) in 1st now and he thinks it's more important to have a good 1st grade teacher than a a good kindergarten teacher (debatable!) so I would do more good as a 1st grade teacher. What do you think? Would you take the new room or keep the "raggedy" (as my husband puts it) room? Would you even let a new room sway your decision? I can't help feeling a bit materialistic...but it really is a great room! Rustle up a response below and give me some advise please!

Oh, and just for fun, here's a picture of my youngest who lost another tooth! He's now missing three at the top lol!

 

Winners & More Dinosaurs!

Drumroll please! The winners of the BragTag giveaway are:

 Congratulations! I will pass your email info to Kim from imagestuff and she will contact you about getting your BragTags! Please come back and let me know which ones you pick - I can't wait to see!

In other news, Friday was not all about Field Day! Thankfully that was only 2 hours in the morning and the rest of the day we did more Dinosaur stuff! We wrote about dinosaurs and then we made paper plate dinos! Now, here is a perfect example of why you should always make a craft prior to trying it at school. I had found a great (or so I thought!) Tyrannosaurus Rex plate idea, but it didn't quite work out as planned.

First though, check out these great Brachiosaurus plates, I got the idea here but opted out of the brads for the legs and neck/tail and just used a glue gun to glue it once the kids had it assembled:

I absolutely love this rainbow one!

About 1/2 my kids made the Brachiosaurus, which meant 1/2 tried the T. Rex which was a disaster. I got it from another site and the template they showed ended up with 1/2 the pieces facing the wrong way! We ended up having to cut and make adjustments and it still didn't end up looking the way it should:

Not exactly what I was hoping for, and not at all like the picture on the site! (By the way, can you tell by the muted colors that mostly my boys chose the T. Rex while the colorful Brachiosaurs were made by the girls?)

Of course the kids enjoyed it and they loved their dinos regardless, but once I got home I had to remedy the problem. I set my kids to work water coloring plates and then I made my husband figure out a T. Rex template for me (I am not artistic at all!). Here's what we came up with:

 Better, don't you think?

 

Here's the template for it, if you're interested:

It's getting late so I'll stop here for the night. I have more dinosaur activities coming up though!

Paleontologist Activity!

Alright folks, I don't mean to upset anyone, but I have it on good authority that I am "The BEST Teacher EVER!!" Of course, this was after we had a super fun science activity, so my students might be a little biased, but still, I'm the best :) EVER!

What did we do that made me so popular? We were paleontologists and excavated dinosaur skulls! Here's  how:

I purchased 2 Safari Dinosaur Skull Toobs. These are the coolest little skulls - there are 11 different kinds of skulls, some are represented more often than others, but out of the two Toobs, we got at least one of each specimen. There were 11 skulls in each Toob.

I'm thinking of getting these Dinosaur Fossil Skeletons for a dinosaur dig in plaster of paris next time!

Here's what I did with the skulls:

 I filled the bottom 1/3 of  9oz red solo cups with water and froze it. This is important because otherwise the skull will sink to the bottom of the cup and freeze right at the surface making it too easy to get out.

 Once the water was frozen I placed a skull on top of the ice and then filled the cup with water.

 I placed the cups back in the freezer and froze them solid. The cloudiness helps obscure the dinosaur skull so the kids can't see what type of skull they got right away!

Today, when I was ready to begin our activity, I gathered everyone at carpet and we talked about how we knew what we know about dinosaurs. Since there were no humans alive when dinosaurs lived, how do we know about them now? Since we've been reading a lot of dinosaur books this week, the kids easily explained about paleontologists finding fossils and digging up skeletons. We talked about how inferences can be made from the fossils - footprints close together might mean that a Stegosaurus was running, and if there are Tyrannosaurus footprints behind the Stegosaurus' footprints it might mean the T. Rex was chasing the stegosaurus. If a dinosaur skeleton is found with lizard bones where it's stomach would have been then we can probably conclude that it was a carnivore that ate lizards etc. A paleontologist has to gather clues and piece together the story of each dinosaur. We talked about tools a paleontologist might use and how fossils are fragile so they have to treat them gently.

I then revealed our activity - to excavate a fossil frozen in ice. We discussed ways to melt the ice to extract the fossil. For instance, dropping it on the floor was discouraged because fossils are fragile (and I didn't want ice every where!). The kids came up with the idea to use something hot like warm water to try to melt the ice. Another student remembered melting ice with salt in a previous experiment. Then one student suggested we set the ice on fire. As I gently explained that it really wouldn't be safe to set our ice on fire, another student came up with the brilliant idea of using the heating lamp that we had for our baby chicks! Since they went to the farm yesterday, it was sitting unused on the table. I agreed that the lamp would be an acceptable alternative to fire. I was so proud that they came up with three possible ways to melt the ice on their own, it makes the experience so much more meaningful when they help create the activity rather than me having everything set out for them already! I set a bowl of salt and a cup of warm water on each table, armed the students with paintbrushes and set them to work:


We popped the ice out of the cup simply by letting the cups sit at room m temperature for a few minutes beforehand.

Students put pinches of salt on their ice blocks and then brushed it around with the paintbrush.

We figured out that turning the ice block on it's side meant that we could see the fossil more easily and there was less ice between it and the surface!

We took turns bringing our ice blocks to sit under the heat lamp. 

We added the salt to the ice while it was under the heat lamp and that combination seemed to be the best!

Soon we had our fossils out and could compare them to the chart to see which specimens we had!

Once we identified our skull we started a rough draft. Today we decided whether we were going the non-fiction route, identifying the skull and relating facts about the dinosaur, or going the fiction route and pretending we were paleontologists who had truly just excavated a fossil and relating what we were thinking and feeling and what we planned to do next.

From start, through clean up and beginning writing, the activity took about an hour. We used a ton of paper towels before I thought to grab some clean rags from the custodian's closet and use those to clean up the melting ice. Our tables have never been cleaner by the way!For the entire hour the kids were fully engaged - trying to predict which dinosaur they had, identifying features as the ice melted, excitedly exclaiming as they got closer and closer to being able to extract the skull! I wish I could show you the pictures I took of their faces, they are just so wrapped up and focused it was awesome!

Tomorrow we will transfer our writing onto our special paper and make some paper plate dinosaurs to go with them! Now that testing is finished, we'll have lots of time for fun stuff these last few days! If you'd like to see the finished writing and paper plate projects be sure to check back tomorrow night! 

Rustle Up a Response: How are you going to spend your last few days of school this year? Anything special planned?

My giveaway ends tomorrow night, please stop by and enter by clicking here!

Writing Wednesday (Freebie)

When I brought in my dinosaur word wall, I hung it up on our mobile whiteboard while my students were out at Music. When they came back and went to carpet it was the first thing they saw. One boy was so excited he said "Oh baby!" and then practically drooled over it lol! They could not wait to get to writing - they finished their math work in record time and asked if they could move directly to carpet to begin writing. I soon had two camps set up - a group of boys gathered on the carpet, enthusiastically writing stories about dinosaurs chasing and eating each other and another group of girls sitting more demurely at our reading table, writing about paleontologists finding bones.

An interesting thing that came up during their writing was the use of exclamation points. The boys wanted to write a suspenseful sentence such as "He looked up and there was a Tyrannosaurus!" but they wanted to ensure the reader would know to pause for suspense, so they wrote it as "He looked up and there !!! was !!! a !!! Tyrannosaurus!!!" It was the perfect chance to read each sentence to them and let them hear the difference. Once I read both sentences to them they could clearly hear that placing exclamation points in the middle of their sentences did not give them the effect they were going for. I was impressed that they had moved to the point where they were writing with a thought to how the story would sound when read aloud!

I decided to share the dinosaur word wall file with you as a freebie today. I used pictures from the public domain, which a) means I don't have to worry about Terms of Use not allowing me to share freebies and b) I think pictures are much better than clipart for science/social studies topics. As I said before, my ELL students often have a hard time with vocabulary, but giving them a realistic picture clue is a great help.

Here's how I made mine:

I bought a brown poster board and dinosaur stickers at Hobby Lobby. Every few weeks Hobby Lobby puts its stickers on sale for 40% off, so that's usually when I stock up for upcoming themes.

 I printed out my word wall cards and arranged them to my liking on the board and glued them down. I actually didn't have room for 2 of the cards, so I had to sacrifice the Kentosaurus and volcano, but I felt the other words were more important. Then I arranged my stickers to decorate the poster board and inspire my students. When I got to work I laminated the whole thing for durability. This step is important because otherwise the cards will peel off over time. I usually leave mine in a prominent position while we work on that theme and then relegate it to a lesser used but still accessible area for anyone who may want to look up a word, so they are often up for a few months. With so much effort put into them, I want these to last!

Here are some of my boys, collaborating on their stories. If you look closely you can see that one of them wrote "Write about dinosaurs" beneath the poster board. I guess they wanted to make sure everyone knew what they were supposed to be doing lol!

I had grabbed those dinosaur books from a school that closed. When they opened it to scavengers teachers, most everything had been stripped down and it was almost a waste of time until I realized that the library still had a ton of old non-fiction books left in it. Some of it is definitely over my kiddos' reading range, but they love the pictures and trying to puzzle out the words. They have found that the captions under the pictures and the diagrams are interesting enough to tough through the books! Of course I have appropriate level texts for them as well (see my dino book picks on the right side of the blog) but not nearly enough for everyone, so this is a nice supplement.

If you'd like a copy of my dino word walls cards, click here to grab it for free in my TPT store! Also, be sure to enter my giveaway, it ends Friday night! Three lucky winners will each get a set of 35 BragTags and chains! Here are the Dinosaur BragTags that my students will earn this week!

I'm linking this up to TBS's Freebie Friday, go check out all the great freebies!

 

Currently....&

I am trying to get ready for the week, I've got a ton to do and not much time to do it in! Report cards are due by the 18th so that means I have to Literacy 1st test all my kiddos and then Fluency test them as well! I think I even have to fit a Title I math test in there too! We're also going on a field trip next Saturday, so I have to get out all the permission slips and secure the purchase orders etc. I have to type up and send out a PTA letter because for some unknown reason I volunteered to be PTA president this year - can't give out specifics, but last year money went missing, things were not done right and it was quite a mess, so silly me agreed to try to straighten everything out this year. Like I needed anything else on my plate! Oh and I have to do my school inventory and my Title I inventory this week too!

Ahhhh! I have a feeling I will be bald by next weekend just from pulling out my own hair! Did I mention that I felt like this would be a good weekend to get back to my diet?! I gained 5 pounds on vacation and thought I'd get serious about my eating habits again - not thinking about all the stress coming up! This will be a serious test of my willpower!

I am linking up with Farley over at Oh Boy 4th Grade! for the May Currently! Woohoo, I get to check that off my list for the month :)

My last two themes this year will be Dinosaurs and Space! Here are some of the dinosaur books we will read:


Oh! And because my kiddos loooove when I read aloud to them, here is our book for the week:

I'm going to be having a giveaway later this week, keep an eye out for it! I'll also have more freebies to share- I have a few in the works right now! Also, Teachers Pay Teachers is having a Teacher Appreciation Sale for 10% off from May 6th-8th! I'm joining in with another 20% off so that works out to 28% off! Yeah, I can't figure that math out either, but I'm going with it :) come by my store and have a look around!