Bug Eyes

I was so excited when I found these at Michael's today that I had to share.  How cool will these be when teaching about insects and their compound eyes?  They were $3 each which was a little pricy so I only bought four of them but Michael's has a 15% off total purchase for teachers (so that made me want to do the happy dance).  Anyways - Deanna Jump has an AWESOME Insect Unit that I did with my class last year and she actually has a page in this unit for the kids to record what they see when looking through insect eyes.  If you are interested in her unit, you can go to this link:  Deanna Jump's Insect Unit. 
I love, love, love these and can't wait to use them with my class.

Gift Ideas

Our awesome PK teachers made this gift for our secretaries.  

 The ladybug bodies were made with children's thumbprints.

This was made by our Kindergarten classes for our nurse.

This was made for one of the Kindergarten volunteers.

Earthworms

Learning about worms is fun!

 It is always enjoyable to see who will be afraid of the worms  and who will dig right in and touch those slimy, wiggly things.  Suprisingly, this year, I had 2 boys who were scared to death of those worms!


There is a really cool website about Herman the Worm that gives lots of factual information about earthworms and I go through it on the promethean board with the kids.  Here is the link to the website:
http://urbanext.illinois.edu/worms/ 
There is also a really good flipchart on Promethean Planet about earthworms that you can download. 

Here are some of the things we did:

We looked at a real earthworm and compared it to a gummy worm.

Students filled in a graphic organizer.

                                                           

We experimented to see how many pennies our gummy worms could hold before our worms snapped.

ABC order:

Label the parts of a worm.

Another graphic organizer:

We used empty 2-liter bottles to make a habitat for our worms.

You can't learn about worms and not have worm dessert.  Yummy!

If you are interested, here are the links to the worksheets I made and used throughout our worm study.

Click HERE for some awesome experiments to do with your worm

Click HERE for more earthwrom worksheets

I bought our worms at Wal-Mart in the hunting/fishing department for about $2.50.