Earth Day and Ocean Fun

Hope everyone had a chance to appreciate the Earth a few weeks ago.  We got to read two great books, one from our fantastic librarian and another I borrowed from a fellow teacher, Our Class is Going Green.  It's written by students!  The kids loved it. We created the anchor chart and also wrote how we can help the Earth.  The students loved making these hand-print Earths.  I found the anchor chart on Pinterest and the hand-print Earth idea here.  

After Earth Day we had a lot of fun with our Oceans Unit.  This starts off with our Treasure's Series book, Fish Faces.

We read quite a few other books and even did some research online to compare Orca whales and Great White Sharks.  I used Deanna Jump's Ocean unit throughout the week.  The kids and I just love her activities.  

New this year, I also found this fantastic sink and float activity which even had me shocked!!  I found it over at Once upon a First Grade Adventure.  This is perfect because we are trying to add more science and using the scientific method into our classrooms.  We had two cups of water.  One was salty. (I mean SALTY, like 1/4 cup of salt!) The other was fresh water.  We put different items in such as a crayon, dice, Starburst candy, eraser and more.  Some of the items sank in both, but some sank in the freshwater but floated in the salt water! The kids loved it!  You can also find a great recording sheet on that site as well!

 To end our ocean unit, we were so lucky to have our fantastic volunteer bring a shell back for each of the kids from her trip to Florida.  Don't they crack you up?