My Week in Review

Happy Easter, peeps!  Our pastor said it best… “Easter is the definitive moment in God’s love story with humanity.”  Oh.my.word.  I’ve never heard it put that way, but I was in LOVE.  SO true!  Hope y’all had a blessed day!!  We spent ours with my in-laws who are in town visiting from Indiana.  Such a fun weekend! 

Speaking of peeps, we celebrated little mister’s birthday on Friday and I gave all the kids these fun little peeps {Pinterest inspired, thank you Eighteen25!!}.  I gave these to my little firsties, too!  After I ate a few boxes myself, of course :)  Love it when I can kill two birds with one stone! 

Last week was nothing short of crazy.  I’m sure y’all all heard about the tornadoes that came whipping through the DFW area last Tuesday. Remember these CRAZY airborne semis?!?!?!?

SCARY.  ‘nuff said.

Thank y’all for all the sweet emails & messages!  Yes…we were FINE.  My area was {praise Jesus} untouched.  However, there was some serious damage to the surrounding areas. We had to duck & cover while we were at school.  All the craziness went down during dismissal, so we kept the kids safe inside and released them to their parents as they came to pick them up.  My mom was randomly visiting that day and she was keeping my boys at home.  My husband couldn’t get a hold of her and worried, so he left work to pick them up and bring them back to his school…SO much safer than our basement-less house.  While they were en route to his campus, they told him not to come back…the weather was looking terribly scary and they were in lockdown.  SO…Mr. Spouse called me and I flipped out.  My whole family…on the road…during tornadic weather.  Not my favorite thought.  I made them reroute to my school and I swear I couldn’t breathe until they walked in the building.  Bless y’all who have to deal with this kind of weather frequently!!!! 

The tornado threw us all off this week, so here’s a condensed version of some of the fun we had {when we weren’t hiding from the storms}…

We started learning about poetry!!!  LOVE, LOVE, LOVE!!!!  We talked about all the different types of poetry and then had a discussion why it’s important and how it helps us.  I made a rough draft anchor chart when I introduced poetry. As the week went on, and we learned more & read more and more poems, I transferred all of our learning onto a new anchor chart that’s currently sitting on my easel waiting to to be hung up in our reading center.

Our little “Poet-Tree” :)

We started the week out with ACROSTIC poems.  I like starting our poetry unit with acrostic poems because they are so familiar with them…we’ve been doing these ALL year!  When I saw Regan’s DARLING Rainbow Name-bows, I knew this had to be our first poetry craftivity.  So stinkin’ PRECIOUS!!!!  What’s more important to a kid than his/her own name?!?!  I know my kids love seeing theirs in print, so I had each of my kids make their own Rainbow Name-bow when we learned about acrostic poetry.  They’re hanging up in our room and we LOVE them!  And what an awesome way to reinforce adjectives!  LOVE IT!!!!  And since we were still using my Weather Math & Literacy activities in our stations, this little craftivity fit in PERFECTLY!

 

Another easy cheesy type of poetry I like to introduce at the beginning of our poetry study is LIST poems.  We’ve been making lists all year, too, so the kids had a great time with these!  We learned about the ou/ow spelling patterns last week, so I incorporated the –ou diphthong into our poetry and we wrote list poems about clouds.  A great little piggyback activity to the rainbow name-bows! 

Speaking of the –ou sound, we also wrote little OUch stories complete with band aids and everything!  We did this little activity during our Writer’s Workshop block of time.  I started with a little mini-lesson about writing with detail and starting our stories with a “hook”.  I wrote a ridiculously true story about how I broke part of my foot this past summer when I got in a fight with my wedges and my wedges won :)  The kids thought that was hilarious and they helped me add some great detail to my story.  They were SO excited to write and illustrate their own OUch stories!  They did AWESOME!!!!

 

I can’t believe there are only 7 more Mondays left in the school year…6 if we don’t count tomorrow ;)  So much to do!!!!!!  Have a great week, sweet friends!!