What have we been up to?

The last few weeks have been SUPER hectic. You know how it goes. However, I just HAVE to share some of the FUN we have been having.

We just finished up a massive unit on the Earth, geology, and landforms. To culminate all we had learned, we made these 3D Earths. My students LOVED making these out of play dough and were in AWE when we cut them in half! This project was great for practicing following multi-step directions!

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A unit on geology would not be complete without exploding volcanoes!! We went outside and exploded some bottles of Diet Big Red with Mentos! As a side note, Mentos changed their packaging and forced me to hunt them down in the candy aisle for over 10 minutes at 6:30 in the morning that day… Not quite how I wanted to start my morning!!

However, these eruptions made it worth it! (A Plea: I normally don’t post pictures of myself on my blog so…. be kind!!) LOL

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As an exploration and extension to learning about volcanoes, my students made their own mini erupting Vs! I had seen this on my instagram feed from Deborah Stewart from @teachpreschool and just HAD to do it!  The kids had a blast with this!

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If you would like to do this science extension, I cut out and laminated Vs and then gave my students a cup with baking soda and two other cups with vinegar. They had to cover their V with baking soda and then dripped the vinegar over their V to watch it erupt.
They sure did love this!

After our geology unit, we began a unit on insects! We have been studying them now for about two weeks. Today we read the book “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” and completed this fun craft extension!

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After we read the book, my students retold the story to their friend and then created a setting for their hungry caterpillar. To make the body parts, my students dipped balloons in paint and then added the details with markers. For the eyes and the mouth I let my students dip their finger into the green paint and add those details. This took about 10 minutes and came out great! Tomorrow we are going to listen to the story again and then write the sequence of events.