April Showers bring May flowers...

Our theme for April is Birds in the Spring. We study things that change in the spring and learn all about birds.

 We were lucky enough this year to have a few tadpoles that grew into toads. I encouraged the children to journal changes in the tadpoles at least twice a week.

 What would a bird unit be without a dirt cup full of worms?

 These nests turned out way super cute!! I shredded some brown paper, gave the kids bowls of diluted white glue and a Styrofoam bowl to drape the paper over. Once they were dry we popped them off of the bowl and Viola!!

 We made some amazing Hummingbird Cake and the kids did a great job at copying the recipe while it baked.

 These flowers were soooooo cute I just couldn't resist.

 For those of you that don't know me that well I make sugar cookies into anything!! Sugar cookies can find their way into my lesson plans at least once a month and this month we made super cute flower cookies. The children were given a lump of yellow and a lump of pink. They had to separate the pink into 5 pieces, roll them into balls arrange them and press them into place. They turned out great.

I thought my calendar was particularly cute this month.

Reptiles!!

 During the month of March we always have so much going on. It is one of my favorites and I have to share it with spring break. Here are some of the fun things we did...


What would a month without sugar cookies be like in my classroom? We learned about primary, secondary and treachery colors when we made the dough such a beautiful (or not)  shade of brown. We shaped it into little turtles and gobbled them up as soon as they were cool enough.

Brown Sugar cookie turtles

I also love the idea of kids making books that they can read to their parents. We give the kids little "flash cards" with words and pictures on them for them to copy. It's a hit with children and their parents.

 We did some turtle/tortoise sorting, and we learned some of the differences.

 Added a little matching alphabet game....

Made some cute little turtles to swim in our pond with tissue paper, mod podge and plastic bowls...

 And even had a visit from a local museum which brought a baby alligator for us to see!!

 Of course we couldn't do this unit without talking a little bit about frogs and toads.

We made a frog life cycle wheel...

 And a Venn Diagram stating differences in frogs and toads.

 

Though the unit is over I am still on the hunt for tadpoles. We successfully grew frogs last year and I hoping for the same this year. I'll keep you posted!!!