Butterflies and Life Cycles, Oh My!

Yikes! Time got away from me, and I haven't been blogging. Sorry about that. So here's the scoop: I am leaving my school, where I have been for the last eight years, and I am going to a brand new school! Brand new, as in, they are still building it! I am so excited! I have gotten to tour it twice (the first time I've ever worn a hard hat!), and it is absolutely beautiful. Actually, it's quite messy and full of construction junk, but it's going to be absolutely beautiful. So, along with all the usual end of the year requirements, I have been packing up my room (how did I collect so much stuff?) and working with my new staff to get our beautiful new school off and running to a great start in the fall.

I met with my new third grade team this morning. We looked at our state standards and created a year-long plan for next year. We are starting off the year with a life cycles unit in science. Each student gets a caterpillar to observe:

(We order Painted Lady butterflies from Insect Lore. They are safe to release in the wild in our area, but be sure to check out your area if you decide to do something similar.)

Once the caterpillar has formed a chrysalis, it goes into an aquarium. We hot glue the lids to some poster board like this:

And then leave the poster board on the top of the tank (I usually tape the far edge so that you can lift it like a lid):

The tank is empty in this picture, but I usually put flowers, sticks and yogurt cup lids with sugar water in the tank right before the butterflies come out.

We also give each student a butterfly book so they can learn about and track the growth of their caterpillar. Here is a caterpillar observation sheet which you can have for FREE because I am super happy with all of the awesomeness going on in my life right now and am feeling generous! Oh, yeah, and also because it's SUMMER! :)

CAFE strategy signs

If you've read The Daily Five by Gail Boushey and Joan Moser, then you've probably also read The CAFE Book as well. I began teaching mini-lessons that incorporated the CAFE strategies a few years ago, and set aside some wall space that looked like this:

You may have noticed that the strategies aren't handwritten. In the book, they recommend writing out the strategies with students (or having a student write the strategy) but I wanted something that looked a little bit more…well…polished. If it was going to stay up on my wall all year, I thought it should look more like a final draft. So I typed up the strategies and added pictures to them as another cue for young readers. If you'd like them, I have made them available as a free download from Teachers Pay Teachers. Just click the picture below:

Please be sure to leave a comment below or write a review on TpT, so I know whether they were helpful or not. Enjoy!

A welcome and a freebie!

It seems strange to be starting up a teaching blog right as I'm ending the school year, but there's never a bad time to say "thank you." And that's basically what this blog is. A big, fat "thank you" to all the teacher bloggers and Pinterest fanatics out there. You see, I'm wrapping up my thirteenth year of teaching, and for too many reasons to go into, it's been a rough one. I had to reassess why I was a teacher in the first place: the kids, of course, and my passion for spreading the love of learning. To keep that passion alive, I started spending a lot of time on Pinterest. A lot of time. You know what I'm talking about. Admit it. You spend too much time there too, right? (Please say yes, so I can tell my husband I'm not the only one.)

Anyway, it turns out that there are a lot of teachers on Pinterest, and in the blogging world, who are really creative and awesome and, most importantly, share their creative, awesome stuff! They've saved me a ton of time and made my teaching even better. And while I was getting super excited about all of this and maybe driving my husband a little bit nuts, a thought popped into my brain…Hey, I've made a lot of my own stuff. I could share it and maybe save someone else some time too! Because, as we all know, time is a hot commodity among teachers. So here I am.

And here is my first gift to you:

Reading Strategies Bookmark

This freebie could be two separate bookmarks or one double-sided bookmark depending on what you want to use it for. One page is the IPICK acronym from The Daily Five, and the other page (shown above) is a list of "Handy" Reading Strategies to help kids decode difficult words. I give my students bookmarks throughout the year that focus on the different skills we are working on in reading. This bookmark is what I use at the beginning of the year, since we start out with lessons on choosing good fit books. Most of my students come into my room familiar with the strategies on the Handy Strategies side since our entire school does Daily Five and CAFE. If they didn't, I would probably choose to introduce the Handy Strategies bookmark after I had taught them the strategies. Let me know if you find this bookmark useful!