Friendship Recipe

At the end of February we were studying functional texts, including advertisements, flyers, directions, and recipes. When we were focusing on recipes, we read the book Enemy Pie by Derek Munson! This book is so good and I think students can really relate to the characters in the story. It is also a great book to use to talk about making predictions. 

There are TONS of great Enemy Pie activities and resources available on the web! Anything from sequencing, problem and solution, to a grammar hunt. In my TpT store, I have a character trait packet that helps students recognize 'higher level' character traits (more than just happy, mad, sad...you know you are tired of those words!). Students recognize character traits by the characters thoughts, actions, and words. Then students write their own stories with characters that show their traits!

                                                

With my class, we spent time creating 'Friendship Recipes.' Students used their knowledge of fractions, measurement, and sequencing to write a recipe. (This was great because we are also in the middle of our measurement unit in math!)

Students brainstormed and wrote their draft recipe in their writing notebooks, then edited and transferred their work on to their final draft. Students used a template that I created on PowerPoint in the outline of a recipe to write the final. Students use markers, colored pencils, and crayons to decorate their recipes. We took this and glued it on to a piece of construction paper. Students then colored a template of a head, arms, and legs to look like themselves. They attached the pieces to the construction paper and then TA-DA! We had a super cute, friendship recipe!

                      

We hung them out in the hall on our clips. I got the string at the Dollar Tree - it is for hanging laundry and ordered the wooden clothes pins from Amazon. This is an awesome way to display items in the hallway - 1) because students can put things up and take them down themselves, 2) you can use it every year, just take down the string, keep the pins attached, 3) you can add and remove pins as needed.

                    

I love how these turned out! Let me know what you think! 

Love & Sparkles,

Miss Jones in Third

Ancient Chinese Fireworks Craft

In third grade in Virginia, one of the biggest (and most fun) units that we teach in social studies is about ancient civilizations. We study Ancient China, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome, and Ancient Greece. The kids love learning about these cultures! They are fun to teach too because each place is interesting and unique! At the end of the unit we get to compare and contrast these cultures and use all that we've learned to create some fun projects. 

This is an example of one of the projects that we did in class to enhance our study of Ancient China. One of the Ancient Chinese contributions was that they invented fireworks. 

We used pipe cleaners, paint, plastic plates and construction paper to create these firework paintings. I took about 4 pipe cleaners and bent them in half. I twisted one side of the halves to make a handle and then put out each individual pipe cleaner at the bottom to create a pointed 'star' shape. We used the twisted pipe cleaners as a handle and dipped the 'star' shape onto the plastic plates, each one with different color of paint. I chose to only use red, blue, yellow, and white so that when the colors mixed, there would not be any yucky, neutral grays or browns. As more students created the project, the paint colors mixed but that made it look even better! 

This project went well with our Ancient China unit, but it could also be used to celebrate Chinese New Year! Students really enjoyed getting to use paint outside of the art classroom and making something so beautiful! You can see that some are simple and some chose to make more complex designs! 

This idea is all over Pinterest - I did not come up with it, I just found a way to incorporate it into what we were learning. :)

Love & Sparkles,

Miss Jones