Mrs. Wishy Washy Giveaway!

I was recently contacted by Hameray Publishing to review Joy Crowley's new collection of easy reader books. I've used Mrs. Wishy Washy in my classroom for years, so I was thrilled to check out what Hameray was offering!

I received two books to review (Disclosure: I received complimentary products for review.  All opinions are my own and this is not a compensated post.)

"Wishy-Washy Clothes" is a short, easy to read book in the "Early Birds" series that focuses on predictable text and high frequency words.  This would be perfect for emergent readers. If you read aloud Mrs. Wishy-Washy's Farm beforehand they will have the added benefit of making text -to-text connections, as well as having the schema of Mrs. Wishy-Washy and her animals. The humorous text and pictures are high interest as well.

The 2nd book I looked at was "Mrs. Wishy-Washy and the Big Wash from the Joy Cowley Collection. In this book, Mrs. Wishy Washy takers her animals to town to find water. Again, the story and illustrations are humorous, which will make it high interest. As well, the book contains rhyming words and onomatopoeia and would be great for teaching punctuation such as quotation marks. I appreciated that at the back of the book there were some teacher tips for Before, During and After reading.

There are already a ton of Mrs. Wishy-Washy resources at Making Learning Fun, and I often use Mrs. Wishy-Washy when I teach my farm unit, so I think that adding these easy readers to my book library will be a big hit! If you're interested in picking up some of these books you can use coupon code ZJCC13 now through 6/30/13 for 20% off your purchase at Hameray Publishing.

They also have a great Pinterest board for Mrs. Wishy-Washy! Check out all of their fun boards and ideas!

Finally, you can win your own Big Book copy of a Joy Crowley book! My kiddos love big books! Just enter via the Rafflecopter below!


a Rafflecopter giveaway

Buggy Freebie!

Sigh...its already Sunday night :( I feel like I got so little accomplished - I really need longer weekends! I caught up on sleep yesterday, but other than that and grocery shopping, I am sadly underachieving!

Well, wait, I did manage to take a Mr.Clean pad to my stairway - it is amazing how quickly little fingerprints build up! And, I did manage to get a start on a Praying Mantis Life cycle pack - I was originally creeped out by those little guys, but after hatching them in class one year I am now a big fan - they're actually kinda cute! I also got a start on lesson plans - have to finish those up after this quick post!

Oh, and I used the random number generator thingy to pick a comment to win the Butterfly Life Cycle pack! Congrats to #9, Lisa! It's on its way via email Lisa!

If you are not Lisa, here's a small consolation prize - an Insect Themed CCVC "I have... Who has..?" game! My students love this game format - and if yours are anything like mine, this is the time of the year where you need lots of little fun breaks, otherwise you end up with the squirmy wormies, the ceaseless chatterers or the imps of destruction - I had one young lady actually use a dry erase marker on my carpet the other day! I tell you, spring time makes their little brains go haywire or something!

Anyways, you can check it out here:

And, just to infuse this post with as much Butterfly love as possible, check out this giveaway from Simply Kinder - it ends tonight so be quick! You can win a Butterfly Garden from Insect Lore!

Alright, back to the laundry and lesson plans that are waiting on me! Have a great week!

Our Classroom is ALIVE!

This is my absolute favorite time of year - I look forward to getting to school in the morning so I can check on all the living things in our room!

First up, our plants are growing like weeds! The seed packets listed the earliest germination at 7 days, but ours have sprouted up after only 5 days! So far our forget-me-nots have outpaced the cantaloupe and turnip seeds, but yesterday we saw the first sprouts in the other pods, so it  shouldn't be long now before the whole greenhouse is full of green shoots:

In order to monitor the progress of our plants, each student has their own folder containing their Plant Life Cycle materials. So far we have started our observation journal, completed the plant labeling page and started working on the life cycle pages.

Next, we got our eggs this week! We have at least 3 different breeds of chicken eggs. I put out a call on Craigslist, and had a sweet woman who raises chickens bring 42 eggs to our school! We have green, blue and reddish brown eggs and it was fascinating to see the differences in width and length. We set them up in our incubator in the corner:

Here's what the different eggs look like:

We also started our Chicken Observation Journal, which provided some interesting insight into who my pessimists and optimists are:
 

I was rather amazed that so many students had so little faith in me to think that 0 of the eggs will hatch! I counted about 6 that said "0" while many chose numbers < 10! I've actually had tremendous luck with hatching - each year we have better and better results. I may soon have to retire and take up chicken farming if I get any better at this! If you have been thinking about hatching chicks and haven't taken the plunge yet, I recommend this incubator and turning rack. This site is also full of great advice!

All of our Chicken Life Cycle materials are kept in blue paper folders, while the Plant Life Cycle materials are kept in green ones. I scored them for 10 cents a piece before school started, and it makes it so much easier to keep everything organized to have individual folders for each student and Life Cycle! Now I can just say "Pull out your blue folders." and know that everyone will have the appropriate materials at their fingertips.

I also have the file saved to my laptop so I can pull it up on the Smartboard as needed. Check out how intently my kiddos were studying our KWL chart:

We also added that we need to find out what the comb and wattle are for, after we completed our labeling page (I honestly had no clue when they asked and decided I would wait until they found out and could tell me). Unfortunately, due to testing our school library is closed for 2 weeks, so we can't go to the library en masse to do research. I will just have to check out a huge assortment of books and have them research the topic in class :)

Before I forget,  Jennifer was the lucky winner of my Plant Life Cycle pack - congrats Jennifer, I'm emailing you the pack now!

 (Who says 13 isn't a lucky number?!)

That's it for our Life Cycles this week, hopefully next week we can start our Butterfly Life Cycles if the caterpillars arrive!