I'm getting a student teacher!

Here we are! Twelve years later!

I love Spring! Our weather has been beautiful and it's making all of the Springtime classroom activities even more enjoyable. But what I am really excited about is that I have a student teacher starting later this week!  I have had some wonderful student teachers and I always really look forward to the experience. I had such a great student teaching experience and want to be able to help someone else have this as well. I was fortunate to work with my very first student teacher twelve years ago (can't believe it's been that long!) Mrs. B and I had so much fun together that it was difficult to remember that she was still a student! We've been teaching together now for eleven years and really enjoy sharing ideas with each other.  The kids seem to confuse us all of the time even though I am way taller than her! Your can check out the link to her classroom website on margin of my blog. She recently included a page just for teachers!

I wanted to post about a few Spring time activities happening in my room and also share an anchor chart that has been very helpful with my kids lately.  My students' writing is really flourishing! They are adding lots of details to their writing and their spelling is really improving. One thing we are having difficulty with is LEAVING SPACES! Ugh! They are leaving little spaces between their words and thinking it is enough. However their words are still smooshed together. So, we've been discussing "spaghetti and meatball" spaces. I'm not sure where I got this idea but I've been using it for a while now.  The "spaghetti" spaces are the little space between letters in a word  and the "meatball" spaces are those between words in a sentence.  As we have writing conferences and sharing time they are beginning to remind each other to leave their "meatball" spaces between words!

We finally got around to planting our seeds last week! I'm a little behind everyone else. Mine may not be going home on Mother's Day but they will be beautiful by the end of the year.  I started by reading Eric Carle's The Tiny Seed. We are moving on to some other Eric Carle projects this week so it was great timing.  We also borrowed some extra marigold seed pods from Mrs. B's garden to observe in our science center. They loved opening the pods and seeing the same seeds on the inside as those that came out of the pouches from Wal-Mart! In fact some some of them were quite astonished that they were the same.

In the science center they also completed a cut -n- paste on plant needs.

Here is one sample from our writing center "must do's " on planting seeds.

   We will be observing our seeds in our plant journals each week as part of our literacy center rotations. You can click on the link to see the entire journal.http://www.scribd.com/doc/86095266/My-Plant-Observation-Journal

         

  

                   Well we finished the planting! Now the waiting begins...we can't wait to see our flowers!

Make sure to check out the "It's a Spring Thing" linky party at Mrs. Lirette"s Learning Detectives.

http://mrsliretteslearningdetectives.blogspot.com/

Lots of great ideas to help you with your spring planning!

Have a great week!

           Mrs. M