Sorry it's been so long!

I cannot believe how long it's been since I've been on here...well, I take that back, I can believe it.  I have been completely tied up in end of the school year insanity.  We have been working for weeks on finishing up our class projects for Pride Night.  At our school, Pride Night is basically an open house in the spring for families to come in and check out all of our hard work, and to visit the 5th graders living museum presentations.  The students all work so hard, and are so proud of what they have accomplished!  In our classroom we've been hard at work on completing our space books.  We also created Space Mosaics using different dried beans.  They loved making these, and they came out so nice!  (I was shocked there wasn't much mess this year from them either.  Usually I find many stray beans on the floor!)  After they created their mosaics we created original space poems to go along with them.  Everyone did such a nice job writing their poems, and many continued to write them after they had published their selected poem. 

They really put their best effort into their work, and I am very proud of all of them!

Another project that we worked very hard on this year was creating our own fable books.  We started with students using the wet watercolor painting technique.  My class was very puzzled as to why we were starting by bathing our paper in water before painting, but once they saw how the watercolors spread and blended when we began painting they loved it.  We later used our paintings to create our hard covers for our fable book pages.  When we made the book pages themselves we used a secret room book page technique.  My class loved that when they reached that magic page in their books and gently pulled on it their secret room opened up, and the morals to their fables appeared.  This is a student's version of the fable The Tortoise and the Hare.  He worked so hard on it! =)

 The rest of the projects that we had on display were our ABCs of the American Revolution posters that we completed during our unit of study, as well as this summer writing craftivity, "Take a Bite Out of Summer" that I got from the fabulous A Cupcake For The Teacher.  I love her blog and products, and my students had a BLAST working on these.  I love one of my little darlings who wrote "I love the summer!  I look forward to going to the vineyard and riding the carousel, and having ice cream.  It is sensational!"  That's sensational writing coming from a third grader! =)  

They all also enjoyed working on mystery math pictures, where they had a coordinate grid and coloring directions to create a mystery picture.  I got this great activity from a teacher friend at school, and I'm so glad she shared, they keep asking to work on new ones!  For some reason I'm unable to post the pictures of their Take a Bite Out of Summer projects and their math mystery pictures, so I guess that will have to be a post for another day. (Tomorrow hopefully!)  Happy Monday!  (8 days left of school!)
~Heather~