All About Me! {Presentations, that is!}

Hello Again!

Building a sense of community is one of the most important things to do in the classroom.  Letting students share about themselves and learn about others is one of the best ways to do this! 

Each Wednesday morning after the announcements {starting about the 3rd week of school}, we have an All About Me presentation.  Each child has a week assigned to them.  The students LOVE this time!  The presentations last about 10-15 minutes and during this time the students family members come and watch the student tell the class about themselves - from what their favorite food is to what their favorite color is to who their favorite sports team is to introducing the class to their family members, etc.  The students create a poster at home with all of these favorites on them and the student uses this poster to guide his/her presentation.

After this presentation, the class creates a book for the student.  The book consists of a page from each classmate about what he/she learned about the week's presenter. The students love writing all about their classmate!  It is also great because it is a time which the students are often using common words such as "like," "favorite," "color," "is," "has," etc.  So it works perfect to make sure that the kids are spelling those words the conventional way. {If that is something you are working on ;)}.  After we finish the book, I read it to the class.  

Note: Sometimes, the kids want to write more than what fits on just one page - I let them write as many pages as they want they just have to put their name on each one and a picture on each one too.

I uploaded a copy of the pages for the book here.  

Happy Tuesday!

Andrea

To Infinity and Beyond!

Well, I can officially say it is Summertime! Here is to a summer of travel and relaxation. 

To kick off the Summer, I spent last week hosting a Space Camp! It was absolutely an out of this world blast :)! 

The activities we did this week are perfect to do with kids of any age! Personally, what I loved about these crafts is that they were super fun, creative, and time consuming!

To kick off the week, we started by making these cute Paper-Mache Astronaut Helmets.  
Of course, while making these helmets we talked about how a real astronaut's helmet has a microphone in it so that they can talk to each other and a tube for oxygen to come into the helmet.  

**Notes: 

1) When making these helmets, it is MUCH better to let the helmets dry for 24 hours after adding the paper mache, then paint the helmet, let the helmet dry, and THEN pop the balloon inside.

2) For the paper mache, do 3 layers - the first layer use whole sheets of paper, then for the next layer use torn sheets of paper, and for the third layer use whole sheets of paper again.  This will add for sturdiness. 

3) When drying the helmets, tie a string to the end of the balloon and hang them in a tree so that it completely dries.

Once the astronaut helmets were completed (it took about 2 days and at least 1 hour each day), all the kids wanted to do was to go outside and play astronaut space games! They could have done this for hours! 

The next craft that we did was alien art! We talked about how we have not found life in outer space yet, but of course there always could be! I then had the kids think in their brain what they would imagine an alien would look like.  It took at least an hour. 

**Note: I had the kids draw a rough draft on a piece of white paper first, then draw their design on the canvas, then paint. 

On the last day, we got as close as we could to experiencing walking on the moon by heading over to our local Hoppin' House and bouncing on Moon Bounces! 

Happy Summer!

Andrea