Compound Words, Descriptive Writing, and Symmetry!

Hi, everyone! Sorry I missed my post last week, but I have a good excuse; As all my teacher-y friends are sadly aware...it's report card writing time! It's a time when you suddenly find a thousand things to clean around the house, in places you have never even touched, and when doing laundry and dishes is surprisingly life-threateningly important. 

But anyways, this is a HAPPY post because the fact that I'm writing it means my report cards are DONE!!! So let's begin with our literacy focus for the week: compound words!

We read that big book of poems all week and, each time we read a poem, we hunted for compound words. By the end of the week, we had learned lots about compound words and felt confident to share our own ideas on sticky notes:

(please excuse my sad drawings!)

I turned Word Work and the Investigation Station (oral language centre) into compound word practice centres. 

At the Word Work centre, we added words together:

We are beginning addition and subtraction next week so I love this simple literacy connection to introduce our upcoming math concept; two smaller, independent words combining to build a greater sum.

At the Investigation Station, students worked together to first solve the compound word puzzles, then record the words they made on a worksheet:

(click HERE or the pics above to download your FREE copy of the compound addition worksheet, compound word puzzles, and two different versions of the compound word puzzles worksheet)

We are beginning to wrap up our focus on descriptive writing. First, we read Tomas' Snowsuit by Robert Munsch.

We described Thomas' snowsuit, then we hauled our own snowsuits into the classroom and did our very best to turn this template:

into this:

(UPDATE 15/03/2016: This activity has been updated and can be found in my Writing Focus #3: Descriptive Writing pack)

Holy Bologna, they were ALL ABOUT having their snowsuits INSIDE the classroom. You'd think I was telling them to break a school rule! The kiddies did a fantastic job describing their very own snowsuits. They were quite proud that their snowsuit wasn't as "ugly" as poor Thomas'!

Now for some symmetry!

When introducing symmetry, we helped Mr. Snowman (whom this kiddies decided to rename "Mr. Halfman" because there was only half of him at the beginning!) find symmetry in his other half:

Boy did they LOVE this activity. Thank you, Ms. Carroll, for the brilliant inspiration, as always!!!

And, finally, as I had promised two weeks ago, here are my kiddies' 5 senses Mr. (and Miss in some cases!) Potato Heads:

(I apologize for the horrible quality...I really need to stop using my phone to take pictures!)

These two are just meant to be together...but it exposes the tragic truth of Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head that the public rarely sees: Mrs. Potato Head must sell her fine jewelry in order to make bail for her jail-sentenced husband. hahaha I kid.

Stay warm and have a great weekend!!! :)