Career Week

The kids love career week, it gives them a chance to explore the possibilities, to tell stories about themselves or people that they know, and at the end of it all, to dress up! So we did lots of fun activities, including one where they drew a picture of what they wanted to be and then said why they wanted to be that; but the pictured activity on the right, is a graph we made of each of the students' parents professions, which was a lot of fun. I already knew all the parent's technical titles and then I reduced those to an easier level of understanding for the children. Then they went through and were able to put a star on the proper group, one for their father and one for their mother. It really got the students to talk about jobs and to explore their friends, especially after hanging it up on the fridge for another week or so where they could always come back to it. You can find my activity packet here.

Luck o' the Irish

Happy St. Patrick's Day to you! We had a lot of fun St. Patrick's day fun and I wanted to share it all with you! The above image is our display board of little leprechauns (their handprint cutout on cardstock with a little green construction paper hat on top; I drew their faces with a black sharpie). This was fun and the parents all thought their little faces were adorable, but the true hit of the display was the cloud rainbows. 

The cloud read: "If I found a pot of gold and a leprechaun gave me 6 wishes I would wish for a rainbow of things" (this worked out great because we also had been learning about rainbows in class). Then on each rainbow colour we wrote down the wish that the students would ask for and boy-oh-boy there were some funny ones! The kids absolutely loved sharing it with their parents too.

We teachers also captured a leprechaun early in the morning before the students arrived and placed him in a box to show them later...but he magically escaped and left us clues to find his hidden treasure. Our simple treasure hunt had our kids reeling with excitement and when they eventually found his pot of gold (a painted black cottage cheese container with a black pipe cleaner as a handle filled with cuties) they were overjoyed!

Food Pyramid

It was our week of nutrition and health and I wanted to do a fun activity to help the children understand which foods went into which categories of the food pyramid. This was a great activity and they loved it. We started at the bottom with the carbohydrates/starches and I had the children taking turns pulling 1 food item from the pile and putting it in the section and then we went on to the next student and then the next until the section was done and then we moved onto the next section. Depending on the group of children I was working with, sometimes there were 2 students selecting a food item at a time. The only real con I had is that our food pyramid was a little unbalanced due to the supply of plastic foods our school had on had.  :)

They loved this unit and at meal times the kids were always telling us which section their food items would go into and what other foods went into which sections and which foods were good for you and which weren't.