Busy Week

It has been all kinds of CRAZY in my classroom the past couple of weeks.  We have been watching with wonder the life cycle of our Painted Lady butterflies.

We also started our plant study.

We planted some grass seed and the kids were excited when they started to grow.

We read these books about the parts of plants:

After reading the books, we labeled the parts of a plant and made the flip book that tells what each part of the plant does.

If you want some more plant ideas, 

you can check out some of my old posts:

Plants

Little Botanists

Plant Stuff

We have 25 days of school left.  We can do this!

Plants

Okay ya'll, I so stole this idea from my compadre, Tammy Riggan, and I just had to share.  (btw, she did give me permission to post about this)   Grass seed is planted in the cups and these little critters will soon be sporting some green hair.  The picture is from 4 of her firsties but I stole the idea and did it with my class too.   

 

I made this anchor chart to go with our learning for the week:

 

We also wrote cinquain poems about plants.  I got this idea from Cara Carroll at the First Grade Parade.  You can visit her post Here to grab yourself a copy of the cinquain poem freebies.

 

The flower patterns that I used with my class I also stole borrowed from Tammy Riggan and she has graciously allowed me to share them with you as a freebie. 

The links are under the pictures of the 3 flowers.

 

Flower 1 (students need to trace 4)

Flower 2 (students need to trace 2)

Flower 3 and Leaf

 

Happy Teaching!

 

Little Botanists

We have been busy this week learning all about the parts of a plant, the functions of each part of the plant, and what plants need in order to survive.  We've also had some fun along the way.

We disected a seed and labeled its parts.

We disected plants too.  I had the kids fold a manilla piece of paper into fourths and label each square with:  petal, stem, leaf, roots.  They then found an example of each part and we taped it in each box.

We labeled the parts of a plant.

After learning the parts of the plant,

we then had to eat all the parts of the plant.

These were the parts we ate:

seed- sunflower seeds

root- carrot

stem- celery

leaf- spinach leaves

flower- broccoli  (the tips of broccoli are actually flower buds)

(FYI:  I let them eat the sunflower seeds as they were labeling the parts of their plant,

so they aren't included on their plates)

We also made this flip book where students wrote the funcion of eact part of the plant.

We also started this little experiment today to actually see what a stem does but we won't be able to see the results until tomorrow.

(And, no we didn't actually do this experiment by this electrical outlet because I am a safety girl, I just sat it up on this shelf out of the way so it wouldn't get knocked over from curious onlookers.)

BrainPop Jr. has a few good videos about plants.

We also planted bean and grass seeds. 

Hopefully when we start writing about plants tomorrow, my little firsties will have a wealth of knowledge to draw upon.

Happy Hump Day Friends!

 

Plant Stuff

This week we are learning about plants.  Here is an anchor chart I made to help us kick off our study.

Here are a few of the books we are reading.

The students will be doing this flower garden part, part, whole and fact family activity.  The flowers were made with Do a Dot markers.  The kids will choose two colors of flowers to put in their garden, then fill out their recording sheet.  The butterfly is made out of pretzels. 

A closer view of the pretzel butterfly:

We will be doing even more fact family practice.  Students will choose a card with two numbers on it and either add or subtract to get their third number and then write its fact families on the petals of a flower.

In this little activity, students will pick the correct flower out of a set by reading attribute clues : 

We will also be doing some writing this week and I made a few writing plan sheets for my students to use.  If you are new to my blog and want to see how I use these plan sheets you can click HERE.

You can grab a copy of all these activities by clicking on any of the pictures above.

We, of course, will be planting some beans and grass.  We will also be labeling the parts of a plant.  I will post more pictures of the stuff we do later this week. 

And now for my happy news.  I won the Learning Resource Lunar Interactive Projection Camera from Swamp Frog First Graders  give away.  Thank you Heidi and Learning Resource!  I am doing the happy dance!  I know I will be posting pictures of that little jewel in my classroom.  I can not wait to use it.