Valentine's Day and More

Well another week has quickly come and gone in first grade.  My kiddos are only 70 days from becoming second graders!  This past week we celebrated Valentine's Day in our classroom by having a Parent Breakfast on Tuesday.  I invited parents into our classroom so that they could take a minute out of their hectic schedules to sit down and enjoy some pastries and juice with their child.  I kindly asked parents to not bring any siblings so that they could really spend some quality one on one time with their first grader.  We had a really great turn out!  I had the students create Valentine's Day cards to present to their parents at the breakfast.  They turned out really cute!  I forgot to get a picture of a student's card, so I took a photo of the sample card I made.  Check it out below:

The students made their bunny using their thumbs and white acrylic paint.  I had them write sweet messages on the inside of the card and then the students presented their parent/guardian with the card at our Parent Breakfast on Valentine's Day.

Valentine's Day is such a fun holiday to celebrate with the students because all of the arts and crafts projects are just so darn cute!  The kids get excited about all the candy and passing out cards to their classmates, and any occasion to wear pink, red, and purple as well as receive beautiful flowers is OK by me :)

A beautiful Valentine's Day flower arrangement that my Mom sent to me at school.  The polka dots fit my classroom decor perfectly :)  Thanks Mom!  

In order to tie in some writing, we created a LOVE acrostic poem (similar to the SNOW one we did a couple of weeks ago).  The kids were familiar with the idea of an acrostic poem and so they were able to come up with some really great ideas!  I rewarded their creativity by breaking out the glitter to decorate the poems.  Don't get me wrong, I love glitter... but often times more glitter winds up on the floor or on the tables than on the craft at hand.  The mess wasn't too bad this time... :)

Koury's acrostic poem:
Like nothing else.
Of your heart.
Very beautiful.
Extraordinary.

Christian's acrostic poem:
Love is in your heart.
Oh, I love you very much!
Valentine's Day is special.
Everything about love is wonderful.

Meanwhile, besides celebrating Valentine's Day we also have been learning about the life cycle of a butterfly.  I love teaching plant and animal life cycles to the kiddos.  I think it is a really interesting topic and the students are so engaged in the material that it makes lesson planning fun.  In order to review all of the information we learned about butterflies and caterpillars throughout the week, I had the students create and label their own butterfly life cycle wheel.  The kids were into it because they got to use pipe cleaners, tissue paper, markers, and glue... and I loved it because my kiddos were fluently using words like "chrysalis" and "metamorphosis."  They did a fantastic job!

My work sample.
1. Egg
2. Caterpillar
3. Chrysalis
4. Butterfly

Student Work Sample # 1

Student Work Sample # 2

This week in first grade we are going to be spending some time reading about and taking an in depth look at Black History.  It should be a very interesting and fun week!

Love,
Mrs. Cook