Farm Centers for Your Classroom

In the spring, farms come to life as crops are planted and baby animals are born.  It's an exciting time down on the farm!  Bring some of that excitement to your classroom with these farm centers...

• Down on the Farm Syllable Sort Literacy Center is perfect for K-2 classrooms. 18 word/ picture cards can be sorted by the number of syllables. All of the words are farm related, thereby increasing your students' vocabularies. This center also includes a recording sheet and labels for your center folder.
  
  
  

• Ducks in a Row is a literacy center that gives Pre-K - 1st grade students practice with print concepts and phonological awareness.  Each duck puzzle has 3 parts: 1 with a picture, 1 bearing the upper case letter with which the picture starts, and 1 with the corresponding lower case letter.
  
  There is 1 duck for each letter of the alphabet. Consonant bearing ducks are white and utilize the primary sound of that letter (no soft consonant sounds are used). Yellow ducks present the vowels and utilize the long sound of the vowel.

• Tractor Races Math Center provides practice with number sense and 1-to-1 correspon-dence for Pre-K-1 students. Increase the difficulty by providing a pair of dice.  Students will then move their game pieces according to the sum of the dice.

• Egg Equations are CCSS aligned for grade K-3. Students will make true equations in their quest to master basic addition and subtraction facts. Gather plastic eggs and fill each one with the equation components. Students will use the components to construct equations appropriate to their abilities. Thus, differentiation is inherent.
  

• Barnyard Tangrams provide 10 farm animal puzzles in 2 formats. These puzzles are great for visual discrimination and developing spatial relationships. They also provide experience with geometric shapes and improve problem solving skills. 
  

• Farm Animal Idioms provide 31 idioms about farm animals. These cards are lovely in literacy centers, super for small group instruction, perfect for partners, ideal for individuals, and great for a variety of games. They are also excellent for ELL and speech therapy students. These idiom cards are aligned with CCSS for grades 3 - 5.
  

• Egg Idioms Book challenges your 3rd - 5th grade students to create a booklet about 17 egg idioms. (BTW, these idioms have no references to Easter or Easter eggs.) After discussing the meanings of idioms, challenge your students to create illustrations of the literal meanings. Their efforts can be compiled into a booklet.
  

Happy spring, y'all. I hope you find some center seeds to grow in your classroom.

More Springsational Poetry

In my quest to inspire passion about poetry, I have 3 more springsational poems for you to try.

• Engage your students in writing a 5 senses poem about spring.  After identifying the 5 senses, challenge your students to describe spring by writing 1 line for each sense.  You can make it a super easy task by giving them a template for their poems, such as this:
• I see ______________
• I hear ________________
• I smell _________________
• I feel _______________
• I taste _________________         

Here's an example:

• Spring
• I see the bright sun shining.
• I hear the baby birds chirping.
• I smell the garden flowers blooming.
• I feel the warm breeze passing.
• I taste the gentle rain that is falling.

Writing 5 senses poems provides a perfect opportunity to highlight adjectives and present participle verbs.  

• We all know that April showers bring May flowers, so during this month dedicated to poetry, rain seems to be an appropriate subject. Hence, try writing Umbrella Poems about rain with your class. (I suggest you provide an umbrella shape for your students' writings, thereby enhancing the shape poem.) The format is easy:
• Line 1 - Write 1 word related to rain.
• Line 2 - Write 2 words that describe line 1.
• Line 3 - Write 3 words that tell how line 1 sounds.  (Think onomatopoeia)  
• Line 4 - Write 4 words that tell what line 1 does.  (This may or may not be a sentence.)
• Line 5 - Repeat the word in line 1, writing it vertically in the handle.

• Tongue twister couplets are tons of fun to write and even more fun to read aloud. Create the first line of the couplet using spring thematic words that begin with the same sound.  The 2nd line should also be a tongue twister about the same topic, however, it may contain words that begin with a different sound. As per traditional couplets, the 2 lines should rhyme and a similar rhythm pattern is desirable. Provide access to a dictionary and/or thesaurus to assist your students' efforts. Then have students trade tongue twisters, challenging each other to read them without getting their tongues twisted. Here's an example:
• Ten terrible tornadoes tore through the town.
• The storms shattered shelters, shook shops, and struck steeples down.

Have fun!

Perfect poetry products picked for you:

Springsational Poetry Activities

April is National Poetry Month and I would love to share my passion for poetry with you.

  

Try some of these Springsational Poetry activites:

• Collaborative poetry is a fun way to use poetry in your classroom. It can be done with the entire class or in small groups. Each student will write 1 sentence about spring on a sentence strip. Give your students a prompt, such as 1 of those listed below. Collect all of the sentence strips and mount them on one large piece of poster paper.  Invite students to illustrate around the poem and display it for everyone to enjoy. Prompts:
• It's a sure sign that it's spring when...
• The best thing about spring is...
• Spring is the best season because...
• The worst thing about spring is...
• Spring weather...
• One spring day, I ...     You get the idea!

• Acrostic poems are always fun and leave the poets free from the need to create rhymes and rhythm. This can be an individual or collaborative effort. Begin by brainstorming a list of spring words, encouraging students to think in extensions; that is, going into more depth on vocabulary. Use word webs on the board to accomplish this (illustration below). Once you have a nice variety of terms, allow students to choose one of the word web words to use for their acrostic. I often have students circle the word on the board that they are going to use, writing their name or initials by it. If you have enough words, each student can use a different one.  If not, you may wish to impose a limit on the number of children who can choose the same word. Then set them loose to create their acrostic poems (example below).

If you are passionate about poetry (or at least enthusiastic), your students will find that feeling is contagious.

Check out these poetry products borne of my passion (how's that for poetic writing?):

It's About Time to Grow Your Spring Centers!

It's about time, teachers, for spring centers.

Here are some spring centers that may add some beauties to your spring bouquet of classroom activities...

Spring Showers Syllable Sorts challenges your students to determine the number of syllables in each word/picture card. The pictures provide support for young readers. This center is low prep and holiday neutral.

How Many Ways - April Edition combines computation with critical thinking.  This center is open ended, providing a great challenge for fast finishers, and/or differentiated instruction.

Spring Square Puzzlers are excellent for exercising your students' problem solving skills.  The challenge is to reconstruct the square array so that all the images match on every interior side.  3 puzzles are included, making differentiation easy and providing a challenge for every grade level.  

The other 2 puzzles are progressively harder as they are a 3x3 array and a 4x4 array. There is a secret clue in each puzzle that can be provided if your students get too frustrated.  

Be forewarned!  Your students will not want to put these puzzles away.

There are more centers to come so check back soon.

You may also like these spring resources:

Here Comes Peter Cottontail!

Are you ready for him?  

Here are some ideas for your classroom:

• Make bunny windsocks to hang from the ceiling. Using a large piece of white construction paper, draw a bunny face on it with markers or crayons. 

     On a 9" x 12" piece of white paper, draw 2 large bunny ears.

                                        

Cut the ears out. Make a cylinder out of the bunny face and glue it. Glue the ears to the inside of the cylinder. Cut 18" - 24" crepe paper streamers and glue them to the inside of the cylinder.

These windsocks will look fabulous hanging from the ceiling. When you can open the windows, the breeze will make them dance!

     

Are you looking for some bunny centers?  Try these:

• Scrattle: The Spring Edition combines word work with computation; individual effort with competition. As in Scrabble™, students use a set of letters to create words. After recording their words, they calculate each word’s score using the Scrabble™ letter values. Then they engage a friend in a battle wherein they compare their scores using >, <, and =. The student with the most >s wins the battle! There are 3 levels of difficulty included in this product, making it perfect for differentiation and applicable to nearly every grade level. Best of all, it's FREE!
  
  

• Easter Hink Pinks & Hinky Pinkies are eggs-actly what you need for spring! They will have your students cracking up as they determine the 2 word answer to these riddles. These are awesome for H.O.T.S. You can also use them as a warm-up egg-tivity, a sponge egg-tivity, a literacy yolk center, or a challenge for fast finishers.  It, too, is FREE!
  

• Easter/Spring Patterns & Sorts provides materials to practice patterning and review color words for pre-K through 2nd grade students. This product includes picture and letter cards, as well as a recording sheet.
  

The next 2 centers are holiday neutral, but work well with spring themed classroom activities.

• Egg Idioms will increase your students' vocabularies and enrich their writing.  After introducing the idioms to your students, use this booklet to have your students illustrate the literal meaning and interpret the figurative meaning. This activity is also great for ELL and speech/language students.
  

• Egg Equations are CCSS aligned for grade K-3. Students will make true equations in the quest to master basic addition and subtraction facts.  Gather plastic eggs and fill each one with the equation components. Students will use the components to construct equations appropriate to their abilities.  Thus, differentiation is inherent.
  

Now that spring has finally arrived, I hope your days are filled with sunshine and smiles.

10 Reasons You Should Teach Poetry

It's about time, teachers, for National Poetry Month.

Here are 10 reasons you should teach poetry:

1. Poetry enables teachers to teach their charges how to read and find meaning in any text.  Figures of speech and literary devices are more readily identified and understood when introduced through poetry (think ELL).
2. You can teach grammar by parsing a poem.  Students can more readily find and identify parts of speech, inflectional forms, syntactic relations, structure, and morphology when working with a brief poem.
3. By examining how poets deviate and/or corrupt the use of punctuation, teachers can draw attention to the power of punctuation (think e e cummings).
4. Poetry facilitates the teaching of writing. Skills such as precise descriptions and economical use of words can be honed through poetry (think Mark Twain's famous quote, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.")
5. Because poetry eschews rules of grammar, otherwise reluctant writers may be more inclined to express themselves in this genre (think song lyrics and rap).
6. Poetry can give students an outlet for their emotions. Judith Viorst's poetry is excellent for demonstrating this.
7. Reading poetry aloud can build trust and empathy in the classroom.
8. Reading poetry aloud promotes speaking and listening skills.  Poetry is widely recognized as an efficient means of promoting fluency.
9. Through poetry, teachers can foster creative expression. In the age of CCSS and multiple choice, standardized testing, creative expression is too often sacrificed.
10. You should teach students to love literature and this is easily accomplished through poetry.  

You may like these poetry resources: