Quick and easy vowel game

Some days I am just really really proud of myself :) I spent about 30 minutes on Tuesday afternoon making a vowel sound game that I found on a website... and it was time well spent! I have played this game with all of my small groups this week, from junior kindergarten to first grade!
I printed out a few sheets of pictures, all of which came from my Microsoft Word clipart. I laminated the pages, did a quick cut on the paper cutter (I love the paper cutter), and voila! Vowel game! I also created five construction paper "mats" for sorting the cards. They look like this:

One side just says the vowel...

And the other side has separate columns for long and short vowel sounds.

Once the students sort the cards, I have them sort each vowel sound into long and short. This game has been a big hit with all my students! I typically pull groups of five students, so I let each student be in charge of one vowel sound.

Okay... and now I'm less proud of myself... I thought I had saved the picture cards, but I just realized that I didn't... I was going to upload them to Scribd and share them here. Oops! If I get a spare minute, I'll go back and make new cards to share... but I pretty much just went through my clipart library, found pictures that I thought students could identify, and inserted them into a Word document (12 pictures per page.) Sorry about that!

Clever as a fox...

My book club has been reading The Case of the Elevator Duck, by Polly Berrien Berends. A lot of the chapter titles in this book are idioms, like "dead duck," and "hatching a plan." Every year when I read this book, the students and I have a big discussion about idioms. I got this idea from my friend Emmy, but it's super cute so I wanted to post it here. I assigned each student a different idiom. On one side of their paper, they had to draw a picture of what the idiom sounds like. On the other side, they drew a picture of what the idiom actually means. Their pictures are so adorable! I'm sorry for all the photos, but I couldn't choose any favorites... so I had to post them all!

She made sure I noticed that she colored the girl's cheeks pink, "because she's embarrassed!" 

This student explained that her picture was an illustration of herself zooming from one activity to another. Look at the little "moving fast" lines that she drew!

In the picture on the left, the speech bubble says "hhhu"--it's a breathing noise! And in the picture on the right, the boy is pointing to his eye. Such great details!

She's been learning how to draw horses--can you tell?

I love the picture on the right--being chased by a buffalo (or a bear... I can't remember) AND there's a cliff! Also she would want me to mention that the skeleton on the left glows in the dark.

This cucumber cracks me up.

My example when explaining this idiom was that even though I had 3 Barbie houses, I always wanted to play with my friend's Barbie house because it had an elevator. The boy who drew this picture drew a Barbie house! And a few minutes ago, he was standing outside my door showing off his work and saying, "I don't even know what a Barbie Dream House looks like." So funny!

In case you can't see it, there's a cat in the tree on the right. Precious.

Recycled log garden

I am a member of the environmental committee at my school, which I am probably way too excited about. I have really been trying to work on my relationship with God's creation, so I figured this committee would be a good way to do that. The committee members decided at the beginning of the year that our goal was going to be to create a functional outdoor space on one of our three campuses. We received a generous donation of logs and stumps, and we all agreed that a multi-purpose "log garden" on our East Memphis campus was something we could construct quickly. So yesterday afternoon, we all met out on the playground and worked our magic! It was so fun. The third grade class was out at recess, and they all jumped at the chance to help us move and arrange the logs. Here are some pictures of our log garden:

Making the logs more stable...

This is the generous man who donated the logs! He was teaching us all about the different layers inside the tree trunk.

Some of the committee members "testing" the play area.

Improving our balance...

The kids couldn't wait to play on the logs!

We arranged the logs so that the students could hop from one log to another (which they love doing!) We also imagine that a teacher could take her class out there for some reading time or for an outdoor lesson in the log garden. At some point, we would love to add a wood border and maybe some cedar or recycled tire chips... but clearly the kids are enjoying the space already!