Happy Easter & Mother's Day!

As many educators are enjoying Spring Break and others are gearing up for Easter Break, I wanted to share some activities we have been completing to continuously develop empathy and perspective.  Spring is the time for Reconciliation at our school and we usually spend some time talking about the Greatest Commandment.  Each year these sweet little otters turn out so unique and adorable!  After learning about the Greatest Commandment, or the Golden Rule for public schools, the students complete a directed drawing and a writing activity about how they will live out the rule!  Click any picture below to find this product in my TPT store!

To fully embrace the upcoming Easter season and in celebration of Holy Week we started our week off by completing a Crucifixion silhouette.  Again, these ALWAYS turn out amazing!  I am so proud of my students every year for making their creation one of a kind!

During Holy Week we spent a bit of time reading about Jesus' last days on Earth and completed a retelling of the events!

 We also did a super fun and challenging Easter fill in activity that you can get from 

Sunday School Resources website!

Planning ahead for Mother's Day

I am planning a super quick and easy activity for Mother's Day this year!  I printed these out 2 per sheet so the kids could just fill in the blanks and make a quick and easy card to decorate for their mothers. I also have a child in my class who lost his mother so I whipped up a matching activity for his dad!

  

Saturday Stray: Across the Curriculum and a FREEBIE!

The year is coming to a close and this time of the year is busy, busy, busy!  Here are some stray things that we have done this past week or so.  This post has a little bit of seasonal ideas, grammar, reading, and writing all mixed into one.  

I am hoping for at least one more week of sanity and then we are on the home stretch!  I have AMAZING parents currently sending in supplies to make our last 10 days SUPER fun, so check back to see what we have planned!

Mother's Day this year has seriously crept up on me.  Not only for my school kids, but also for my own family.  I saw this picture on pinterest a while back and because I teach at a religious school, I thought it was perfect!  Although I couldn't afford to buy frames for all the kids, I did cut them to a standard size so they could be framed if the parents wanted to.

 This page is adorable and super easy for first graders to do by themselves but there was no credit on the pdf I have so I don't know who it belongs to.  If you know, please let me know.

Many of our comprehension skills we have taught, reviewed, assessed and so on.  However, context clues was a first this past week.  Unlike the other comprehension skills, I think the creators of our basal series purposely put this skill towards the end so the kids would be more capable of understanding its complexity.

First, I introduced the skill with this file that I made to display whole class.  You can grab it as a FREEBIE by clicking the picture below!

Later in the week we read some Amelia Bedelia books!  I forgot how completely adorable these books are and how much I miss reading TO my kids.  It seems as the year goes on I find less and less opportunities to read to them.  It is sad that our day is sooo jam-packed that there is not much time for read alouds.  I need to work harder at that!  We just read the books and jotted down some thoughts about Amelia and her confusion because she didn't consider her context clues.

The past two weeks we have also introduced subjects and predicates.  I started off with something familiar that my kids LOVE.  Silly sentences is a great resource that I keep at work on words or even work on writing.  After making the sentences we went back and traced the subjects with red. 

The next day we worked on this skill I included the predicates and we sorted them.  I then had the kids write down one real sentence and one silly sentence.  Then we underlined the subject with red and the predicate with blue.  For a little more enrichment we even circled the verbs to point out the starting point to the predicate.

 I used this next activity as my informal assessment.  Once again there is no name to give credit to so if you know who this belongs to, please let me know.  The sheet had all the subjects and predicates mixed up. They first had to color the subjects red and predicates blue.  Then they had to match them to make REAL sentences.

Do you play battleship with your kids?  I stumbled upon this game during my student teaching and have used it for sight words and spelling words!  It is so much fun.  Basically the two kids have the same board.  They each get four markers to put on four words.  Then the kids just take turns guessing where their partners markers are.  If they guess correct they get to take their partners marker, or sink their ship!

Something a bit more personal:  We are sooo thankful spring weather is warming up and we are spending more and more time outside.  One of our favorite things to do is hitting up yard sales!  Here is a pic of little M heading out to check out some sales.

And just cause I couldn't resist.  This is a drawing she made of our family!

If you would like to share some stray things from your week please link up below!