Noodles and Bagels!

Happy Mother's Day - at least for a few more hours! I really have no idea how teacher moms do it. At the end of the day, I am legit exhausted! If I had to go home and still be on my game, it would be disastrous. So, I am really in awe of you all. :)

Just a few things tonight!

First, let me show you this cute little thing we did this week. We are going on a field trip to a nature museum tomorrow (ahh!!) and part of our time at the museum will be observing butterflies. So we learned about the butterfly life cycle and made this little crafty thing.

This is a printable from The Mailbox so I can't share it with you... but it would be pretty easy to make your own version. We used different noodles for each stage of the life cycle. I didn't have anything for the egg, but I would have used orzo or ditalini. For the caterpillar stage, we used rotini, for the pupa stage we used medium shells, and for the butterfly stage we used bow tie pasta! Or I think the box said farfalle... whatevs.

It was a good assessment because I would hold up a pasta and ask which stage it represented, and I was able to figure out right away who knew what was up with the butterflies!

I've also seen it where you use the noodles to make a little necklace of the life cycle. So there you go!

Second, my natural resources post was featured on Bagels and Blogs today!

Bagels and Blogs is hosted by Donna at Math Coach's Corner. She highlights 5 blogs a week with creative ideas that usually come with freebies! You should look at today's edition as well as past Bagels and Blogs posts!

Third, if you were paying attention above..... we are going on a field trip tomorrow! I am feeling very anxious about it. We are taking a train AND a public bus so I just hope everything goes well. Keep me in your thoughts tomorrow!

Hope your week goes well!

Head, Thorax, Abdomen!

Today we took a little detour from our normal course of action. My cousin, Kelley, is going to school to be a teacher and she came in and taught a lesson to my class!

She is in a crazy class called Insects and People, and for her final project she had to either write a ridiculous paper, rear an insect, or teach a lesson about insects. Clearly she picked the best option. :) So today my class learned about bees!

I definitely did not take pictures of everything... but she had the kids make a black and yellow foldable about bees.

One page was about the life cycle of a bee.

This isn't the finished page, but each bean stood for a stage of the life cycle. Underneath the beans, the kids glued a little piece of paper that said how many days the bee stays in that stage.

There were also pages about types of bees and body parts of bees! We also used a page from Reagan's Gone Buggy Unit!


Part of our super fun day was learning a song about an insect's body parts. I took a little video in case you've never sung this song before. My class LOVED it and sang it all day.

Later, we resumed our normal science unit and learned why fossils are important. We had a special conversation about extinction to make sure we knew that when something dies, it isn't necessarily extinct.

We put together these little fossil puzzles to help us understand that fossils give us clues about plants and animals because the fossils LOOK like the plant or animal that they came from!

I would give this to you... but it came from my science Teacher Activity Guide! I actually ordered this over the weekend because I don't have any of the supplemental stuff for my science program... only the kid books and my teacher's manual. And I had to ask my principal to buy the teacher's manual for me! But the guide was well worth the $4 I paid for it because they really liked this activity and it helped them understand different types of fossils and the type of work that paleontologists do.

And now that this linky party is over a week old, I think it's time to join up. :)