Hurricane Sandy - Teachers Please help!

Most of my family emerged without any scrapes from Hurricane Sandy. There are trees down and fences for both my brother-in-laws in New Jersey but all of these things can be taken care of. They will not have power for some time. Here in North Carolina it was cold, some snow and minor power outages. Many people in our country have lost so much and are struggling to recover. The Red Cross asks that those of us who can to please give blood as so many blood drives were cancelled because of Hurricane Sandy and if you can the Red Cross is asking for donations to help those who are trying to get back on their feet. If you cannot give blood or a donation please send your prayers to all of those who are getting up to cold conditions and trying to get their families and lives back to normal. Please check on your friends and remember the teachers who will go back to work and do all they can to bring love and security to the children they teach each day. Love to all,

Arthur Meets the President

Here is great online reading of the book Arthur Meets the President by Mark Brown at koljr. Hope you can share this with your honeys as we all await the end of election madness. Let's teach civility and kindness! Enjoy,

Stellaluna 3-D Art I Love a Good Rectangle

There have been years when I really didn't want to read the book Stellaluna near Halloween. I'm a science freak and I really felt all of the great learning about bats was being drowned out by Halloween craziness. I really don't know why this year was different except that it seemed the perfect time to compare fiction and informational texts using the common core standards. Well I couldn't be happier with the little honeys and what they have learned. It is music to the teacher's soul to hear the kids using the language they have learned in school about comparing texts. I always have to have some kind of art activity and I wanted it to be "Science Art" as it is called in my class. That is real representations with an artistic twist. I used the trusty rectangle to help the children make their own original art. I have a lot of pictures so bear with me as I share. This project took about 4 days in 20-30 blocks. I have to show this picture first in case you don't look any further. This is one of the finished pieces and one of the little girls nestled a baby bat inside the Mom just like Stellaluna. Need I say more...

This shows one of the children cutting a bat from a brown rectangle of folded paper. I showed them an example of how to draw the half bat but they all drew their own and they are amazing.

Tearing light brown long rectangles to make the branches. It is important for me to show you these photos. I so believe in nurturing the creative spirit of children.

Almost finished piece without the leaves. We used the Stellaluna book for reference in making the art. We used brown instead of black since we were learning about fruit bats. Everything was made out of a series of rectangles. These kids are amazing!

Where the Wild Things Are Math Center

Source: teacherspayteachers.com via Sarah on Pinterest

Math Center using Maurice Sendak's Book Where the Wild Things Are You can use this for many different activities in math. This center meets math standard 1.NBT This is easily differentiated. Enjoy,