It's a New Year, It's a New Post, It's 2013!...and a Freebie

Happy New Year bloggy friends!!  My class was super busy this last week as we transitioned into the new year.  We had fun creating goals for ourselves and celebrating what we are good at!  I gave my kiddos mirrors and had them draw their determined face!  They were super excited about writing their names in fancy letters with as many curly cues as they wanted:)

Here is a 2013 Goals freebie for you to use!  Happy New Year friends!  So glad and grateful for the blogging world!!

They had fun playing a couple of 1 more, 1 less, 2 more, 2 less, 10 more, 10 less year games.  Each player has a game board of years.  Players take turns uncovering years covered by counters and finding years on either of their game boards that are more or less.  These muffins are looking for years that are 1 less!

Also, we talked about forces, touching on gravity and friction with a New Year's Eve ball drop activity.  The kids loved watching the "ball"/bead drop down the straw coated with different materials (oil, hand lotion, flour, oil, hand sanitizer, dish soap, syrup etc.)  The little scientists in the making did a nice bar graph prediction before we experimented to predict what material would work the best!

Who knew hand lotion would allow the ball to drop at the perfect speed?

You can check all these activities out and more in my New Year's packet!

This is one of my favourite January art activities that I have been doing with my class for quite a few years now!  These city snow scenes are so easy and the kids get so creative!  Just cut up a bunch of different coloured construction paper.  Instruct your muffins to make sure each building is right next door to one another and to leave a space for the road/sidewalk at the bottom.  Have them add black windows to each building and encourage creativity!  They always impress me!

I got this idea from a great arts and crafts book called:

Happy Sunday!  I am off for a cross-country ski!!  It is looking nice and sunny out there!! Yippee!!

Panda Bears, Polar Bears, and Grizzly Bears, Oh my!

Oh my!!!  We have been having a wonderful week in my little class.  They made me laugh so hard today!!  Love their personalities!  I am so grateful for a less busy week without interruptions.  My Smart Board is still on the fritz - that is one thing I could ask for - no more technology problems - it works for about 10 minutes and then shuts off.  To make matters worse my mouse started behaving strangely...  It is amazing how much we rely on technology!

We started off the week with a little discussion of the basic needs of bears!  Click on below for a little freebie!

Then, we did a little compare and contrast between grizzly and polar bears.  Love that critical thinking!

Here is an example of what one of my little tykes wrote!

So as we continue our study of bears we made our Polar Bear tear art today.  it is always SO cute to see the look of terror when they hear they have to tear and not cut!!!  What do you MEAN!! I don't use SCISSORS!!!  She has LOST her mind!!!   It's art my friends!!!  Crazy, creative art like these bears always makes me laugh!

Check out the detail on this cute bear!

This bear is sitting on his tush although I am told he is actually standing and growling:) 

At first glance, one would think this bear was flying.  I'm told this bear is about to attack a human, complete with sound effects!  Oh my!!  LOL!

Introducing the poised and thoughtful bear.  You need seal?  Oh, just over here good sir!

Levitation bears are so cute and there is always more than one:)

Bear on the edge!!

Bear on the edge of glory!

 This art project is super easy.  All you need is blue construction paper, white computer paper, and glue!  You may want to give them each a cotton ball to add a little fur:)  Have a beary good week!!!

Butterfly Art

 I was trying to come up with some art for our Plant Unit in my Grade 1 class.  I wanted to do something with flowers so I went to the dollar store in search of some potpourri.  Instead I found these great faux flower petals in pink, white, gold, cream and silver.  I decided we would make something out of them!  To make the butterflies we used the petals for wings and some pipe cleaner for bodies.  Then my students added antennas with a black felt.  My wonderful assistant came up with the backdrop.  Using glitter paint we washed the background blue and added a little tree in the corner.  Then my students decorated the tree and created grass with coloured tissue paper.  Glitter glue was used to create movement of the butterflies, as well as extra decoration and glitz.  My students swooned over this project.  Below is the end result!  Happy creating!!