Snowflakes Falling & Contraction Surgery

I love Mr. Spouse.  Like, BIG love him.  Even when he’s being a turd, I adore the man.  However, I think it’s crazy how helpless men are when they’re sick.  Completely helpless.  I’ve been less than sympathetic toward him and his recent bout of sickness this week.  Not sure what’s wrong with him, but I’m sure hoping I don’t get it. I started feeling a little guilty about my lack of nurturing, so I made him some soup tonight.  And it was pretty dang good ifidosaysomyself. 

I’ve been escaping the germs in my house for even better germs at school :)  We’ve been incorporating cutesy little snowmen into our learning this week, but we’ve also been knee deep in some big stuff…contractions, inferencing, place value, and problem solving just to name a few. 

We started out the week introducing my little “Contraction Crocodile” {from my Crazy for Contractions unit} to kick off our little contraction activities.

Then we did a little surgery :)  I found this darling idea on Pinterest from Mrs. D. Lue Pann at Buzzing About Second Grade…contraction surgery!!!  LOVE!!!  The kids got masks & surgical gloves and then went to town with their scalpels {scissors} cutting apart words and then bandaging new words {contractions} together.  The kids were SO pumped!  I put them in small ‘surgical teams’ and each doctor got to perform surgery while the other team members assisted in surgery if the doc needed help.  I swear they’ve never been more engaged.  I took all the bandaged words and then made a little anchor chart{ish} to remind the kids what we learned.  And seriously…they’ve been knockin’ my socks off with their use & recognition of contractions!  I’m so dang excited!

  

  

We do word problems in our calendar notebooks almost everyday, but we got a little crazy today and added a little craftivity into the mix.  Of course, this was Pinterest inspired as well.  I loved the idea of this little art activity from Joanna Davis at Our Art Lately.  Precious, right!? 

Well, we pretty much did the same thing, but I threw in a little problem solving and patterning to tie it all together.  The kids had to solve the word problem, create a number sentence, and then write a complete sentence answering the question. Once I checked to make sure everything was correct, the kids got to work creating their snowmen.  I had them make a pattern on the scarves to tie in last week’s objectives and then they added thumbprint snowflakes to match the sum of the word problem.

LOVE!

TGIF sweet friends!!!  This will be the best Friday the 13th yet :)