Spring has Sprung!

We have been working on the 4 seasons, weather and recently, spring and plants. Here are some of the things we have been working on! I apologize that some of the pictures are sideways :-/

We did a unit on the four seasons, identifying the months in those seasons and the weather conditions and range of temperatures we see at those times. I made this felt board tree that we manipulated with during our conversations and books about weather/seasons.

Summer Tree

Fall Tree

Winter Tree

Spring Tree

Here is just something I made for outside of my classroom so people knew where we were. I used velcro to attach the specials and its dry erase to change the times.

We did a Very Hungry Caterpillar Unit which is always fun. So much counting, identifying days of the week, identifying fruits, colors, butterfly life cycle, etc. On Friday we made a Very Hungry Caterpillar fruit salad, tried all the fruits the caterpillar did in the story, then mixed them all up to a fruit salad. We were almost late for the bus it was so delicious! A big thank you to my amazing speech pathologist who let me use a lot of these resources! We used those little fruit popsicle sticks as our "recipe" for fruit salad. I had them all in a basket and each student got to take turns pulling them out and reading me the recipe: how many and what fruit?

Currently, we are doing some plant experiments, learning about the plant life cycle and watching growth. Our current experiment is what do plants need to grow? We are tracking the growth of four different beans: one with sun and water, one with only sun, one with only water, and one with neither. Which one will grow? We are going to chart on our graph once they start sprouting.

Here is a cute printable that I laminated. I will use this during our counting stations on Thursday afternoons!

We are making grass heads and identifying parts of our bodies. Plants are living just like us! Once the grass grows, it will look like hair. A cute, but sometimes confusing analogy ;-)

Back to seasons, I made this sort with a common icon. First we colored all the icons the corresponding color, then added them onto our colored mat to see which months were in which season. It was a really cool way for the kids to understand the topic.

We made season wheels from plates. I loved these black plates for high contrast. We had a ton of leftovers from a City BBQ party. This also linked in with our felt board tree at the beginning of the post.

We did a bit about kites while talking about weather-wind. There is a 5 Little Kites felt board story that I made characters to. We did experiments: Will the wind blow it? and used a fan to blow different classroom objects and observed if the wind was able to blow it or not. Here was a fun math game that we played. As you can see, each one is differentiated. We used the dice that you can see in my previous post from January-March. Students had to roll their dice then find that number on their kite, color it in. The first person with all their kite colored won the game.

We read a story about a bunny and talked about the main character. Then we made him with paper plates, cotton balls (fine motor-we pulled them all apart and we threaded the pipe cleaners through the back of the plate), added eyes, nose and ears.

We focused on eggs, spring and bunnies and not Easter for obvious reasons. So we wrote a class poem called Wake Up, Spring and each line was Wake up, ________. They had to choose an egg and open it, identify what was inside and help me try to spell it using our knowledge of letter sounds. I had different objects in the eggs, ones that we have talked about in recent units and CVC words that we know (pig, dog), etc. Then we read our poem and made our own spring wreathes, see below:

I used paint chips from Home Depot to cut out pastel eggs and they got to choose some, glue them onto this spring paper plate that I cut the middle out of, and glued on pastel marshmallows on after counting them out.