What We've Been Up To! + A Valentine Freebie for You!

I’m spending tonight working on my reports for Parent-Teacher conference night on Thursday. So, my post tonight is going to be short and sweet. I want to share a few activities we’ve been working on in my first grade class and end with a Valentine’s Day freebie for you! 🙂

On Friday, we ended our integrated science and literacy unit on polar animals with a blubber science experiment. The experiment is easy to complete and every year, my kids LOVE it! The only thing you need is cold water, a big bowl, some shortening, and plastic baggies. After reading about how blubber helps polar animals adapt to their environment and survive the cold climate, my firsties got to experience what blubber feels like in icy water! We first dipped our bare hands into the icy water without the blubber. Then, we made a hypothesis about what we thought the blubber glove would feel like. After testing it out, we drew a conclusion and discovered that blubber keeps polar animals warm and dry!

I really wish you could see their little faces! They looked shocked when they realized they could not feel the water with the blubber glove on! 🙂

In math today, I met with my higher math group during our last Daily Math round. We are beginning to study fractions and my high kiddos are picking this up very quickly. I decided to wing a little math enrichment lesson and gave directions to the students on drawing a picture. I gave them some rules but let them have a lot of creativity. Then, we studied our pictures and wrote fractions to represent each part of our picture. They had so much fun and it helped them practice labeling the parts of a set.

Before lunch, we practiced deciphering between a fact and an opinion. After writing so many opinion pieces lately, they have really caught onto this skill faster than previous years. I have half of a really neat Valentine’s Day Writing Pack created that I will sadly not finish in time this year. You’ll have to wait til next year to see it. 😉 Until then, here is a page from it that we used in class today. You can grab it for free by clicking on the black and white copy below and downloading it from Google Docs.