Ms. White's Kiddos: Bats

Friday, November 1, 2013

The Day After Halloween...Sugar Overload!

Does anyone else feel like they were run over by a bus? The day after Halloween should be its own national holiday or at least a teacher work day. I am so exhausted from our Halloween festivities yesterday and all my kiddos were Energizer bunnies today. Too much sugar perhaps? Yesterday we celebrated our bat unit with a fruit bat party...no cookies and cupcakes were allowed. It took a little convincing to some parents that we needed fruit donated and not sweets and boy did they come through! We had so much fruit we could have feed a full colony of bats!!! Here is a few pictures of how we spent our day exploring and learning with bats.

Rolling and adding up two or three dice and then adding or subtracting 10 to find the sum or difference.

Don't they look so cute in their costumes?

Did you know that a bat can eat over 600 mosquitoes in one hour?

Making our 100 mosquito plates.

Bat Stew...yum!

Adding or subtracting our "stew sticks" and sorting into the correct answer cauldrons.

Bat Fact Families

Measuring various sizes of bats with the grossest candy ever made...CANDY CORN. Don't you just love this little superhero and white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland?

And an interactive center rotation with my kiddos favorite Lakeshore Learning Promethean board game....Place Value Haunted House. You can purchase this awesome resource HERE.

I am really glad my kiddos had a great time trick-or-treating even though I feel as if we did not get that much learning in today. I am just grateful that we did not have any meltdowns including myself!

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Going Batty & Math Centers

Have I mentioned before how much I love teaching writing? Well I do and this past weeks unit is one of my favorite to teach...BATS! My teammates and I are combining science and social studies into our writing blocks so this past week our kiddos built their background knowledge of bats to write a Cinquain Poem. Here is a peek at some of our work...

Our vocabulary words & picture cards with an anchor chart of Bats "can", "have", "are"

Using a T-chart to distinguish between mega and micro bats.

Our noun, verb, and adjective chart to help aid us in writing our Cinquains

Writing our Cinquain Poems on bat templates and cutting out

We will spend this upcoming week writing an expository piece based on all of the facts we learned last week about bats. The kiddos will be introduced to explaining sentences to help upgrade their paragraphs to eight sentences. YIPEE!!!
My kiddos were so excited on Friday during our math block. Mostly in part because we begin our Daily 5 Math rotations on Monday, but also because I placed my Halloween centers into our math work bins. Here is a look spending one last day building our stamina with partners before they will be come independent machines on Monday.