Donated Easter Baskets

                    Donated 
      Easter Baskets

      Every year  my 5th graders begin a collection of empty clementine boxes.  In the spring the boxes are taken home by the students to paint and decorate. All families have a can or two of interior wall paint left over from a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, or  family room.  The kids paint the boxes and with smiling faces bring them back to school.

                       

  
          During Lent we begin to collect donations of candy, plastic eggs, Easter grass, stuffed animals, books, toys, school supplies, toothpaste and tooth brushes, just to name a few items. 

      The kids set up an " Easter Basket Store" in my classroom. Baskets are chosen and filled with Easter grass. Each child decides who they are shopping for, little boy or girl, older boy or girl.
             

        

The shopping begins!
                 

           

After shopping, each student made a tag for a boy or girl.

              As you can see, every basket is completely different.  Here is a small sample of the 104 Easter baskets that were filled by my outstanding students and their generous families.

      The baskets were wrapped in plastic bags and loaded  up to be delivered.  Parents have also volunteered to deliver all the Easter baskets to a local food pantry just in time for Easter!

 Everyone has realized

 that it is definitely better to give than receive.

             This is a wonderful Lenten project for children to understand being charitable.
           

 


Please feel free to leave a comment.  I always enjoy hearing from you.

Beti

Crayon Sight Words

               

Crayons!!

    Last year I saw these cute Dutch Boy paint chip swatches at a hardware store and I could note resist taking a whole range of colors.  At the time I was not sure what I would do with them, but I just had to have them.  My husband cringes when I walk into the paint department. I always walk out with a handful of paint chips.

  Thank you Dutch Boy Paints for these adorable crayons! They are very cute!
 

               My students have been making learning game activities for their 1st grade buddies.  These would be perfect for their sight word recognition. 

    A sheet of label stickers came out and were applied to the crayons. 

       I gave three of my girls this list of Dolch Pre-Primer sight vocabulary words and the rest was history.   My 5th grade girls just  love to do projects for our first grade friends. 

          These wonderful young ladies made a matching game from the list of sight words. I will give them an opportunity this week to work with some 1st graders using the game that they made. A learning experience for both 5th and 1st grade students.

     Do you have your students work with younger students in your building?
I would love to hear about it.

    Please leave a comment.  I would love to read your ideas.

Enjoy the day! 

I saw this crocus popping out of the ground in Alabama.

 Spring should be right around the corner.

  I linked up with Forever in Fifth Grade. Please use this link to see the wonderful ideas teachers have found. 
www.foreverinfifthgrade.blogspot.com
 

Beti    

ABC Caps

A B C 

               We decided to work on another service project for our little friends in the kindergarten class.  My students enjoy seeing the kindergarteners when we go down to Music class. Once a month my students sit with the kindergarten children while at weekly mass. 
         
              The Green Team at St. Michael Catholic School is very hard working. Recycled bottle caps have been collected and were just waiting for a fun and  useful up-cycle project.

         First, my students needed to look through the bottle cap collection.  Groups of three of the same color cap were collected. These colorful gallon milk jug caps were the perfect size.  We needed 26 groups of three caps. Our school Administrative Assistant kindly offered to print out labels with capital and lower case letters of the alphabet for our project.    

        Next, the labels needed to be cut an glued onto the caps. You can see, my 5th graders did the cutting of the letters. That is why they aren't perfect. The next step was to find an appropriate sticker picture for each letter.  This proved to be quite a project. But I think my students did a very good job. The Modpodge was applied over the letters. Three or four layers of Modpodge was added to make sure the stickers adhered to the caps.  Little fingers won't be able to pick the letters off of the caps.

        I teach in a Catholic school, so Jesus in the manger, for the letter "J", was no problem for our students.

              A variety of colors were used so that color matching of 5 year olds would be used in addition to matching the letters and the pictures.  

             Finding the appropriate pictures was a challenge for my fifth graders.  They had a large variety of stickers to choose from.  Sometimes a picture would be chosen but had to be discarded because the younger children might not be able to identify and match it to the letters.   That is why I cut a circle of yellow paper to match with Y and y,  the word "BOXING" to match with X and x, and "VOTED" as a match for V and v.  

            This was a group project in which so many of my students had a hand i the works.   Great Team Work 5th grade!

            I hope this post will inspire you and your class to reach out and help to younger children in your school.

      Please go to Forever in 5th Grade for the Show and Tell Linky to see all the great ideas.
foreverinfifthgrade.blogspot.com 

           Please leave a short comment if you have a spare minute. I'd love to hear from you.


  Beti

Personal Offices are Beneficial

             

Personal Offices

     I am the teacher at school that makes all sorts of things out of junk. So here was my version of a personal office.

        If you know me at all, I don't throw anything away.  (I have lessons from my first years of teaching.)  I also don't like to spend a lot of money on things that I can make myself.  A few years ago my class needed new personal offices and I found these boxes in the school cardboard recycle bin.  St. Michael Parish hosts fish dinners on Fridays during Lent.  So there were plenty of these fish boxes for the taking.  A application of wide clear tape on the corners, and I was done. They fold up and store on a shelf.   These personal offices have lasted for a good many years and didn't cost me a dime.

         I like to add information to the personal offices that can lead students to better writing. Here is a list of irregular verbs that can be tricky for some students.

        A chart with  comparisons can be helpful when writing an answer on a test.
       (Please excuse the outer cutting of paper on this chart.  Before school started I had  8th grade students do the cutting and pasting for me. They wanted service hours.  I would take any help I could get the week before school in August!)

      You can see that I like to turn my students desks so that wandering eyes do not have a chance to take a peek at the paper of a classmate. 

      As you can see these boxes were the perfect size for our 5th grade desks. I know they are not the prettiest or cutest that you have ever seen, but they do work well for my students. Each child has a private place to take their test.  I also like to turn desks for test taking.

       When each child finishes their test, they keep their personal office up as not to disturb any classmates.  Some students become very anxious when they see other children finishing early and turning tests in before others.  This also gives everyone the same amount of time to complete and check over answers written on the test paper.  So many times children rush through a test and leave answers blank.  Other children don't bother to reread paragraphs or short answers that they have written.  Before anyone turns a test I ask them to check all their answers and reread what they have written.  Then I ask for a "show of hands" of those who have found a mistake.   I see smiles of those students who have found a mistake and have made a correction.

    

      Do you use personal offices or study corrals in your class? 

Please leave a short comment if you have an extra minute.  I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas.  

Have a Fabulous day!
Beti

 


 

Recycled bottle caps into Math Matching game

    Recycled  Math Matching Game

           Do you need an activity that can be done at home with your kids during our time in quarantine?  This would be an easy, fun, and educational craft activity that you and your kids can do  tomorrow.  If you have older kids, they can help out those younger kiddos.   A whole family craft would be a great memory for your family.

        Since our School has earned the Green School certification for many years, so we collected plastic bottle caps instead of throwing them away. I decided that it was time to put these beautiful and colorful pieces of plastic to good use around St. Michael Catholic School. 

     My 5th graders are always up for a new project to help or serve someone else.  The kindergarten class directly below our room was our projected target.

      Number Matching and Counting Game

      We found 20 large green  bottle caps from juice containers. The students counted out the correct number of stickers to match the 1 - 20 numbers. The stickers were applied to the green caps. 20 orange caps were found. The numbers 1-20 were printed on labels, cut out, and applied to the orange caps. (Some fifth graders are still working on their cutting skills.) Now the Mod Podge work had begun. Several coats of the Mod Podge were applied  to both the green and orange caps.

This is self correcting with the matching number on the underside of the large green caps.

      We will have to wait for the ratings to come back from our kindergarten friends downstairs. Hopefully, we get 2 thumbs up!

Today I am linking up with Forever in Fifth Grade for the February Show and Tell. 
www.foreverinfifthgrade.blogspot.com
   

Hop on over to find all sorts of ideas for your classroom.

Enjoy every day to the fullest!

Beti

Bunnies and Eggs

Paint Chip Bunnies

   
      In Spring I need to engage my students in thinking about our Easter service project.  My students make and fill  Easter baskets for a local food pantry.  Here are some of my students with the Easter baskets that they have stuffed full of candy, toys, books, school supplies, and of course a stuffed animal.

      The baskets all need to have a tag.  The tags identify if the baskets is made for a "Little boy" , "Little girl",  Older boy", or "Older girl".  I went to the paint department of local stores to collect paint swatches to make these tags. Large tags were used for the bunnies and small swatches became the eggs. Bunny and egg templates were made from tag board for the students to trace before cutting.

         This young man is working on cutting out a bunny shape the he traced on the yellow paint swatch. You can see a completed purple bunny along with a pile of egg shapes on his desk. He has been very busy.

    A large pile of eggs has been finished by this young lady.

   One more purple bunny is coming soon.

   

            These paint swatches have such wonderful colors.  I try to pick Spring colors. There are so many colors and shades to pick from. The paint departments always have an unending supply.  My students are very diligent when cutting out the eggs and bunnies.  I am so very proud of my 5th graders because they are kind and generous. They enjoy making things to give to others.

Think Spring!
Beti 

Bottle Cap Bunnies, etc.

Bottle Cap Bunnies  and Chicks make 

      you want Spring to come quickly!          

     

                                                 Hippity Hop!

            I like to use recycled items and up-cycle them into something else.  This week my 5th grade students made Easter goody bags for our 1st grade buddies.  Our school Green Team had collected thousands of colorful plastic bottle caps.  These would be a perfect jumping off point for an Easter project.

           In my classroom stash of craft supplies, we found a variety of colorful foam shapes. Coordinating colors! Yes!

     I drew a basic shape of a bunny and a chick on the board and let my artistic students go.  All I have to do is point them in the right direction. 

    All sorts of Bunnies appeared.

         A blue bunny received a yellow pom pom nose.

 This pink cap had a label which was removed.  Some of paper remained and looked very cute as white bunny cheeks.

     I always a student who goes that extra step.  Here an extra cap along with more pink foam was added with hot glue to make a body to go with the large pink ears.

      Chicks were very popular, too. 

                    This little guy has these cute orange feet.

 And you never know what shows up.

Check out the Doodle Bugs Teaching " Five for Friday" weekly  linky party.

www.doddlebugsteaching.blogspot.com

    
      Our 1st grade buddies, enjoyed their goody bags which contained a book, a pencil, and this little bottle cap bunny, chick, or other animal. The cracked egg cards and envelope Baskets were also in the package. You can find these in a previous post.
      https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7774043845369657299#editor/target=post;postID=7441001858555575102;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=3;src=link
   Wishing everyone a Happy Easter!

 Please a comment if you have a minute. I'd love to hear from you.


Beti