Dental Health and more

Hi friends,

I'm back for another edition of Five For Friday with Doodle Bugs Teaching. I'm at least a week behind on uploading pictures, so these five things are recent, but not necessarily THIS past week.

FAT FRIDAY - On my campus teachers host a Fat Friday about once per month. This month 1st grade and 5th grade teachers teamed up for a Mardi Gras themed feast of cajun seafood. Concerned about cost, I decided we should try to get some food donated. So, I called up our local Fish Place and....YES! Fish Place was happy and even excited to help out! The store very generously donated a large quantity of food to our staff!!! We purchased some additional food and each us made a salad or dessert to add to the buffet. And, one of our fifth grade teachers made a phenominal pot of gumbo too.

The entire staff had more than enough to eat and I ended up bringing home some jambalaya, salad, and cupcakes. Dinner = DONE. Does your campus host something similar? My previous school  had a birthday breakfast once per month hosted by groups of teachers.

The salad I made for Fat Friday was a Broccoli Bacon Vinegarette Salad that is to die for! I got the recipe a few years ago from another teacher. I think she got it from HEB Central Market. You gotta try it:

This is a picture I found online, but this looks just like it. Here's what you need to make it:

3 large crown of broccoli
1/2 c. of mayonnaise
2/3 c. of bacon vinegareete dressing (found at HEB in front of the grill where the lady cooks and talks about receipes on the weekend)
sunflower seeds
Craisans
shredded cheddar
fresh cooked bacon

Mix mayo and vinegarette in a bowl. You can vary the portions to taste. You have it right when you can't taste any mayo. Add cut up broccoli crowns and mix until dressed. Add all other items and mix together.

February is Dental Health Month, so we did a little reading about primary and permanent teeth, how many teeth we have, and how to care for them. Then, my firsties had a blast counting their own teeth (and gaps) and creating marshmallow teeth mouths. Many students decided to try to make a model of their own mouths with gaps in just right spaces! I got the idea from Cindy Sweeny's TpT store.

We pressed the molars with our fingers to make them look a litte larger. Notice the gap left for a missing front tooth:

Then, we drew and colored a tongue inside the mouth. The kids were excited take this project home to show their parents. 

Next, we wrote about it, of course!

This resource is from Susan Jones' TpT store. She writes an incredible little blog called TGIF - Thank God It's First Grade!

The 100th day of school was a week ago, but I have to share this story. My class was making their 100th day trail mix using ten each of ten different snacks. The snacks were in little cups. I kept seeing a student eat directly out the cup and I would say, "M****, don't eat from the cup, sweetie. Put the goldfish on your graph. You can eat it when you're finished." The little girl told me she wasn't eating from the cup. A few minutes later I saw her again, so I repeated my instructions again. Again, she assured me she was not eating from the cup, she was putting the goldfish om the graph. The third time I thought I saw her eating the snacks I went over to more closely inspect what she was doing and this is what I saw:

The boxes on the graph were too small to fit the entire snack in so she was biting each snack down to size to fit in each square!!! Ba-ha-ha-ha. Pobrecita!!!! In her mind, she was not eating directly from the cup. She was making her snacks fit and she was going to eat what was on the graph when she was finished. Next year, I'll make my own graph - with bigger boxes! How funny! Look at the headless fish; just the little tails are left. He he he.

Sping break is coming!!!! Woo-hoo! The first weekend I'm going on a girls' trip to do a little wine tasting in the Texas Hill Country. The following weekend I'm taking my girlies to Galveston to visit Schlitterbahn and Moody Gardens with one of my friends and her daughter. CAN.NOT.WAIT. What are your plans???

Have a great week,

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,