May Currently!

Hello my fellow bloggers!  I have been pretty M.I.A. lately.  I am in the process of closing out my final year at the school I have been teaching out for almost a decade.  I am really excited about the adventure that waits for me!  I have completed my May Currently, so here's that! I hope to update here soon!

March Currently!

February Adventures

Division is not my favorite thing to teach normally, but this year I was excited for it!  I gave ou manipulative blocks to the kids and had them show their division using them.  They loved grouping their blocks and they caught on quickly!  It made for an easy to transition for them do work on homework worksheets.  Here are some pictures!

Open House kicks off what we call "Catholic Schools Week."  We invite families into the classroom to do activities and see what their children are learning.  This year, I wanted the kids to make yarn balls.  I saw this idea on Pinterest.  I clicked on the link which brought me over to Make and Take, which is a pretty cool blog!  The craft was messy, and I forgot a very important step!  I didn't lightly squeeze out the extra glue.  Only 2 of them turned out ok.  :(  Maybe next time it will work better!

 

To end "Catholic Schools Week," we have our Peace Parade.  I work in the rough neighborhood in Oakland, Ca.  There is a lot of violence, so this is what we do to support peace.  One of my many jobs is to be sure we have police protection for our local police department.  They have been absolutely AMAZING for the last 6 years!  We march around our neighborhood, all 350 kids with our band leading the way!   There is a local retirement home that loves watching us march by! They line the windows of the building and wave.  All around, it's a positive and fun day!

Chinese New Year was celebrated by creating lanterns and watching a video about why it is celebrated and why it is so important.  

Valentine's Day was celebrated and was crazy!  Pink, Red, and White filled the classroom!  Miss Walterhouse was spoiled and spoiled her kids back with hearts filled with candy!

 February is almost over!  I can't even believe it.  I can't wait to see what is in store for the rest of this year!



Brianne

Canvas Art

I'm back!  :)  So a couple of weeks ago, I was on Pinterest and found this AMAZING art project on Oh Boy 3rd Grade.  I decided to see how much it would cost for me to do this, so I headed to Michael's!  When I got there, I went to the canvas section.  For a pack of 7 canvas boards, it was $19.99.  There was also a BOGO sale.  I bought 4 packs and did 1 BOGO.  This gave me enough for each student and 1 for me!  When I got up to the counter, I used my teacher discount.  All in all, with tax, it cost me $80 for this project.  I already had plenty of scrapbook paper! When I got to school that Monday, we began the project.  The kids had a blast!  I gave them each a paper plate, which they cut in half to use as  the sun.  They traced it onto the canvas.  Then they began painting around the sun with blue paint.  I let them mix blues to create their own sky color.

 This is what it looked like when the boards were completed!

Once these dried, which was the next day, we used scrapbook paper to cut out the rays of the sun.  We used Modge Podge to attach them to the canvas.   They turned out pretty awesome! We also added a swirl for an added effect.  I put some glitter on there too...I love glitter!  :)

The final step was adding words. One of my parents has a Cricket, which I am SUPER jealous of, and was grateful enough to cut out all of the words for us to use for this project.  I teach at a Catholic school, so we began listing words that we felt represented lessons we had learned through out the years in everything we had read about.  Once the words were glued on, the project was complete!!  My kids loved them, and so did our WCEA/WASC team!  Here is the final product!  :)

Overall, this was an AWESOME project and we had a blast doing it.  I can't wait to do it again next year!!!

Brianne

 

February Currently

My life since October!

Oh man!  It's been FOREVER.....again!  Here's an update on all of them fun things going on in the Lavender room and beyond.

In October, we worked with our kindergarten buddies to create spiders!  eww!  They worked in our cafeteria with paint and plates and pipe cleaners and created the coolest looking spiders!  Here are just a few from that afternoon!

Magnetism was the topic is science in October and November.  Talk about fun!  Students were give vases filled with water and food coloring.  Inside of each vase was 5 things that were magnetized and 5 things that were not.  Students used magnets on the outside of the vase to pull up the things that were.  The magnets were not super "strong," so the challenge was getting them all the way to the top without them falling back to the bottom.  It was a fun experiment!

                                                                                       

They also created a magnet holder using a cup and a magnet.  Each group had to see how many paperclips would fit on the magnet before it was no longer magnetic.  It was interesting.  Each group ended up with a different number, which showed that each magnet has a different magnetic charge.

                                   

In November, I took a day off and traveled to St. Louis, MO!  My brother has been living there for the past 5 years, finishing college and going to grad school.  It was a fun trip!  My friends daughter Hayden got a BIG surprise when she walked in for Sunday Night Football and I was there.  We didn't tell her I was coming.  Overall, it was a MUCH needed and VERY enjoyable mini-vaca.  

                    

When I returned, my class turned in California Mission Projects.  Each student has to visit a Mission and create a scrapbook about their visit.  If you are interested, please drop me an email and I will send you the guidelines!  Other classes got the opportunity to come in and view the projects!

Christmas finally got here and it was time for a break.  I decided Disneyland was the place to go!!  Here is some of my amazing trip!!!  If you haven't had the opportunity to go, you really should!!!

                                                                                        

NEEDLESS to say, it has been an absolutely CRAZY couple of months!!! I hope to be back to my regular blog schedule as soon as I can!!!  Happy New Year Everyone!!!!

Brianne