Celebrating Earth Day

As a teacher, I feel that teaching students about Earth Day is a priority.  Children need to understand the ideas of sustainable solutions, ways to help and ways to hurt our earth and why all of those things are so important to our survival.  Depending on their age, there are a variety of concepts that could be taught, from simple concepts of trees are good, garbage is bad....right up to the effects of pollution, and global warming.  

For my first and second graders, I made it a priority that they knew the importance of a few things.  1) Why do we have Earth Day?  Who created it?  When?  Why?  What are some important facts about Earth Day?  2) Ways that we, as humans, hurt our Earth.  3) Ways that we, as humans, can help our Earth.   4) The 3 R's (reduce, reuse, recycle).  

Living on St. Kitts, the 3 R's was a tough concept to help kids understand and practice as the island does not do any recycling, but we surely made the best ideas we could as to ways we can reduce and reuse to lower the amount of recyclable items we are putting into our trash!  

To show what my students knew - here is what they did!  Try to envision them printed, folded up brochure style and looking amazing! =)   The file is not very clear..Sorry!  But I was surely proud of their hard work!

 

One Day Without Shoes

Today was National One Day Without Shoes day to commemorate those around the world who are not as fortunate and live without shoes.  To share in our passion for those, this video was played today in assembly and each classroom took some pictures of themselves without their shoes on.  Check out how awesome my kids are!

What did you do today that was special and helped you to be grateful for the life you live and things you have?

Kite Flying and Easter

There are few words to describe the pure enjoyment children have when hunting for easter eggs and flying kites.. When they happen in the same day, in the Caribbean, with sun, wind and friends.. Life is perfect!

Check out our amazing day of Easter Egg Hunting and Kite Flying Day!

Some Projects...

Do you ever have those projects that you expect to be quick, easy, fun and done in no time...and they end up taking so much longer than expected, involving way more depth than you thought and then you have more than one of those and they all culminate at the EXACT same time causing chaos?!  Maybe it is just because I am still learning or maybe its just normal!  So a few blogs ago, when I was talking about week 4 and starting a literary element unit and a plant unit, I never thought that on week 8 we would be finishing them up and FINALLY moving on on week 9!  I only have about 90 minutes a week of teaching time for Science and Social Studies and then a 2.5 hour block on Friday's where a sub is with my kids...which makes getting in what I want to observe for learning tough!  Regardless, we moved s.l.o.w.l.y through our plant unit!  Luckily, when we finally dove into the final project from an amazing unit created by Linda Kamp, the kids blew me away with their writing skills and knowledge on plants, plant parts, chlorophyl, photosynthesis, jobs of the plant parts, and so much more!!  Check out the unit here on TPT! The kids really showed me just how smart they were =)

As far as our literary element unit - we read and discussed the literary elements in so many books I think my kids are experts!  They are noticing literary elements like I never imagined!  We worked collaboratively as a class the first few books, students did a Sylvester and the Magic Pebble book study with literary elements from Reagan Tunstall, and finally got to brainstorm and write their own story using literary elements!  The story writing took awhile as we also have a limited amount of Writer's Workshop time in a day, and we eventually just took some time off from our Daily 5 and dove into finishing our Literary Element Story final copy!  Occasionally, I let the kids type their stories and this one they really wanted to type - so I caved..and added MORE time onto our project - but it was so worth it to see their final copies because they rocked =)

We also read some Robert Munsch Alligator Baby and completed a great craftivity relating to that!  Check out the unit here on TPT and see how great my kiddos did!  We really love Robert Munsch!

Moving on - my Mom will be arriving in St Kitts to visit me in 23 days and I CANNOT WAIT!!  I took a Monday/Tuesday off and we will get 4 days together to chill and relax then she is coming to work with me for a couple days before leaving me again!  While I HATE saying goodbye at the end of these visits, I am SO ecstatic for her to be here again and have it be JUST her and I!!  This girl really loves her Mom and has learned to appreciate and value her even more since moving to another country!

Happy March! =)