Place Value Pirates

Today we made place value pirates! It was a little tricky for some of the little darlings, but with support they did a great job! I got the idea from pinterest of course, and made the template. The kids wrote the number word on the bandanna, the standard form in the mouth and the expanded form on the beard. They were very excited about this activity.

 We also finished our construction paper houses which are always cute! Most of them followed the expectations of making everything out of paper, but some "forgot".

Wanted Posters and The Start of Writing Power

Our last Pirate activity were wanted posters. The students were quite excited about them, and though they are pretty simple, some of them were quite funny!

We also started Writing Power this week, and our first activities was making invitations. We talk about how the writer and the reader are in a very close relationship and how the writer always keeps the reader in mind when writing their stories. We also talk about how our writing should invite the reader in and make them want to keep reading what we are writing. To do this we made invitations inviting our readers to a "Thinking Party"! Students understand that getting an invitation to a party is an exciting thing and that excitement should translate to their readers from their writing. Our next lesson is on Brain Pockets! Stay tuned!!

Piratey Things

So we are doing a small unit on pirates this week and therefore we did a few 'piratey" things.

We completed our pirate glyph and the kids did really well, they handled it better than I anticipated and we got through it pretty quickly!

Cute right?
We also did a" look back on our summer" activity, and I entitled it "Summer, Ho!"(it was the most piratey title I could come up with). The students were given a spyglass, and had to draw a picture of something they did this summer. Then they had to write their name, what they did and a detail about what they did. Some really "got it" and others.....not so much....

I am thinking of having the kids create a wanted poster as though they are pirates wanted for some crime or other....but we'll see.

We have also read many Pirate books, which the kids have loved.
Some favourites:
Small Saul
Fluffy: Scourge of the Sea
Pirate Pearl
Pirates Go to School

The kids are enjoying it, it really fires their imagination and increase their excitement level for school. It's been a fun break  from Frogs for me as well, and I may do it again next year, unless I see something awesome on Pinterest! haha