Watermelon Festival Craft: 3-D Watermelon Life Cycle Craftivity

Create a 3-D Watermelon craft when you teach about watermelons, life cycles, or plants during your science units. This craft is perfect to reinforce the topics taught during this science lesson and it works well as a science center too. 

Learn more about this watermelon craft at my blog {HERE}.

Thanks, 

Robin @ Sweet Tea Classroom

Twelve Ways to Celebrate Writing

As a blogger, I know the power of the audience.  It's you readers out there that make me want to blog, and make me want to make quality blog posts!  Don't our children need this same sense of audience to motivate their writing?  I think so!

Here are some ideas for celebrating the children's writing:

1.  Share in Class!  Have one child read his/ her story to the class.  Class is expected to listen and ask questions that "prove they were listening."  This works well when the child is "mid-story" in order to get ideas on where to go from this point.

2.  Small Group Shares! Have children work in groups of 2 or three to share their stories as above.

3.  Share Your Best Sentence!  I like this one because there's usually enough time for each child to share one sentence.  If the children know it's coming, that helps motivate the children to work on the quality of their sentences.

4.  Share With Someone Else in the Building!  There are lots of adults in an elementary school who would be thrilled to "play along" with this one!  It's a great motivator to promise a child that he can read his story to the custodian, or the secretary, or the cafeteria workers.  It's a win-win!

Come on over to Elementary Matters to see more ways to celebrate the writing of your students!

Easter Freebies!

Are you looking for Easter ideas?  Do you have an Easter freebie to share?

I felt it was time for an Easter Linky Party.  I hadn't seen any, so I decided to set one up!

Just hop on over to Elementary Matters, link up, or check out the freebies left from others!  Have fun!

Booking Across New Hampshire

Happy Booking Across the USA!  There are over 50 bloggers representing 50 states who posted about their states!  What are we posting about?  Books, of course!  Everyone has found a book that represents their state.

I'm so excited about the book I chose!

Click image for link to Amazon.

A River Ran Wild by Lynne Cherry is a piece of history, and a lesson about respect for the environment.  Plus, it is a beautiful taste of the state of New Hampshire!

When I first picked up this book, I thought I had a nice picture book about a river that runs through Massachusetts and New Hampshire, but it turned out to be so much more!

This book would be a great book to read when learning about Native Americans or when learning about the environment.  It's a great choice to read on Earth Day because of the environmental lesson.  It's also a great book for teaching history as well as the beauty of New England.  

I had many thoughts about activities connected to this book, but settled on one that celebrates the beauty of the clean waters of the Nashua River.

Come on over to Elementary Matters to see more about the book, a fun art project to go with the book, and see more books about New Hampshire as well as more books by Lynne Cherry!  (I'm sure you'll recognize a few!)

How NOT to Read Fluently

Today, my students spent some of our reading time practicing fluency.  Especially at this time of year, I go out of my way to make it fun.  (Brain research shows us that "fun" is a big motivator, but I think teachers knew that before the research was done!)

Click image to download freebie.

There are 4 important parts to fluency:

1. automaticity in word recognition 
2. accurate word recognition
3. rate (speed) of reading
4. prosody, or expression

I thought this activity would be perfect to put into my emergency sub plans.  It's got limited materials and is a skill that needs to be practiced frequently.  I've typed up the directions for you to download and put into your own emergency plans.  Come on over to Elementary Matters to learn more!

Enjoy!

Christmas Story Prompts {FREEBIE}

Looking for a way to put a *spark* into your Writer's Workshop during the Christmas craze?

I have a brand-new set of Christmas story prompts to share with you! I've made them in color and black-and-white to please the ink fairies. :) There is also a prompt included for those sweet kiddos who do not celebrate the holiday season.

Hop on over to grab it (for FREE, of course!) from my TpT store!