Groundhogs, Clouds, Space, and Stained Teeth Experiment

...well, more like Five for Saturday. I'm late to the party.

I started off the week in Arizona. It was b-e-a-u-tiful! My husband had a conference on Monday and Tuesday, but we flew out on Saturday morning to take in some sights. It was the first time to Arizona for both of us. I wanted to see the Grand Canyon, but due to some scheduling conflicts we had to stay closer to Phoenix so I settled for Sedona. I was NOT dissapointed. We took a Pink Jeep Tour and it was amazing!

You gotta go if you get the chance. Anyway I flew back to Houston on Monday, so it was a four day work week for me. Here's some highlights:

The end of last week learned about groundhogs and Groundhog Day. All but one of my students predicted Phil would NOT see his shadow and spring was just around the corner. All but that one student was wrong. Sad face. My kiddos also had a blast figuring out who could whistle and who could not...because groundhogs can make a whistling noise. Then, to start off this week we did some All About... writing and made a groundhog craftivity.

We finished up our weather review by studying clouds. We made these cotton ball clouds and hung them in the hallway. Making the Cirrus clouds look whispy was a challenge for my firsties.

Next, we started a unit on space. We learned a song to help us remember the order of the planets...the same exact song I still remember from fifth grade. Thank you Ms. Galloway and Ms. Pursley. Except now Pluto is a dwarf planet. Sheesh! We did some guided coloring and pasting of the eight planets in order:

But, the absolute favorite activity was on Friday when we learned about the phases of the moon with a little assistance from the Oreo cookie.

Oreo Moon phases worksheet by Amanda Whitaker

This week we will be learning about dental hygiene. But, we started our Dental Health experiment a little early because our school's science fair was on Thursday. The upper grades are required to participate and students in the lower grades can participate too. Anyway, I created these posters based on an experiment I remember from first grade. Thank you Ms. Miller. The idea is to see the effect that water, coke, and tea may have on your teeth. Substitute hard boiled eggs for teeth. We made our predictions, formed a hypothesis, checked our submerged eggs daily, and recorded our results. When I converted the file to a pdf so I could print it poster size, I guess the words in the teeth shifted on the first poster. Oops.

Monday is our 100th day celebration and Friday is our Friendship party. It's going to be an interesting week! Have a good one,