Winter's Last Hurrah! Awaiting Spring!

I an linking up again at Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday. Here is a glimpse at my week.

The snow finally caught up to us on the west coast of Canada. This is a picture from our kitchen window on Sunday afternoon. The snow continued to fall through the night and we had a snow day on Monday.

The kids had a great time this week playing and sledding in the snow. It is disappearing now, but there is a chance of some more coming this weekend.


My class had a great time following the Olympics. They were so excited every time Canada won a medal. We began writing stories last week from my writing activities package. They are finally done and on the bulletin board. I am so proud of the stories they created. Even my weakest students wrote incredible stories. They also created fabulous illustrations to go along with them. I can hardly wait for the parents to see them next week at our student-led conferences.


My students have been having a blast doing idioms. When I found this blog post by Joanne from Head Over Heels for Teaching, I had to show it to my class. Now they have homework for the weekend. I can hardly wait to see the idioms they bring to school.
I also created a set of task cards which we played with today. I am amazed at how much they have learned about idioms.


February is such a jam packed month, it is hard to find time to do teaching of core material. I find that I need to squeeze it in between all the events going on. We have just started working with measurement in math and with the scientific process in science. I was able to get a set of measurement tools cards from Camping Teacher and I also created a set of anchor charts and conversions that we will be using.
The kids had fun going around and measuring things in the classroom using measuring tapes, rulers, links, cubes, pencils, erasers, and hands.
We also did a math lesson as an experiment. We wrote it up using the scientific method and then we proceeded to test it out. I will share what we did next week after we try it out again with the parents at the conferences.


Finally, I just wanted to comment on how effective I am finding the rules for WBT.
I have modified them a bit for my class, but they work like a charm. I have not needed to use a treasure box, behavior charts, or any other types of motivators this year. It is exciting to see the children buying into following the rules and taking it so seriously. It is time to say goodbye to the winter theme and create a new and brighter set for the spring. This set will be available for free for the weekend if you would like to grab a set for next winter.