April Showers

Aloha friends!  Can you believe it is mid-April already!!??  The countdown has begun and I cannot believe how few days I have left!  

We get out on May 24th.  That is 27 days left to make sure my kiddos are ready for 3rd grade!!  I think they are ready, but I always get a little nervous around this time.  Did I do enough, what could I have done better?

Why are we so hard on ourselves?  I know I have put in as much work as possible to meet everyone's needs, but somedays I feel like I need to do more.  Let's just say I am getting a bit burnt out. Blah!!  I have not been my usual chipper self lately and I don't like it :(

Well to alleviate my stress and give the kiddos a break too, I plan to change things up a bit over the next few weeks.  I will keep you posted on some fun things I have in mind :)

I wanted to share with you a project I have been working on over the past few weeks.  Last week we made some spring flowers.

We looked at some pictures of different flowers and then I told the students I wanted them to create their own to display on our bulletin board.  I said they could use markers, crayons, watercolors or whatever they had on hand in their toolbox.

I love how creative they were and how each had their own style.  Some were teeny, tiny and some were quite large.

I added them all up to our bulletin board and added some clouds.

This week I wanted to add to our board to complete it.

Since this is poetry month I thought it would be fun write our own poems after reading so much of it ourselves.  I decided to teach them how to write a Cinquain.  

I showed them the pattern and then we wrote one together.  It was great to review our adjectives, nouns and verbs!  They caught on very quickly and I told them I wanted them to write their own about rain.  We brainstormed some vocabulary and they got busy.

Once we wrote out rough drafts I gave them a raindrop to write their poems on.  I had to show them again exactly how to write it.

We had a few mistakes, but once they got it down they came out great!

I love the way it all came together.  They really enjoyed reading each others poems and sharing their own.  It was a great way to review parts of speech and learn a new form of poetry.  It was also simple enough to get even my reluctant writers to complete it.

Just click on the pic below to grab this template :)

What fun adventures have you been up to this week?  I'd love to hear what you have been working on, or what exciting things you have planned.