Ending Our Year In A Life Cycle Garden

Oh, sweet summertime! Friday was my last day at school

and before I forget I wanted to share some of the fun things 

did for our end of year open house.  

Every year I take all kinds of pictures of this wonderful event 

but by the time I finish purging and packing up my

classroom I'm too worn out to post them!

I know you can relate!

This year for our celebration of learning we

decided to turn our hallway into a life cycle garden! Our last 

quarter is all about life cycles and insects.  We studied the 

life cycles of  frogs, ants, bees and of course butterflies!

We  incorporated a lot of writing...

This one made me giggle...

"If I was a butterfly......I would fly on to my sister's door and listen to my sister 

on the phone." Ha!

This one made my teacher heart happy! I love it when kiddos use the 

vocabulary they've learned in their writing!

We made these little caterpillars to illustrate the stages of a 

butterfly's life cycle.

You can download this free Butterfly Kids writing craft HERE

My teammate made this butterfly writing craft with her class. 

These were a HUGE hit!  We turned ourselves into butterflies 

to go with our writing.  My kids LOVE it when they get to

use pictures of themselves!  

I took pictures of each of my kiddos then had them cut them out.

I gave each student about a 6" by 8" piece of tissue

paper to fan fold, then we stapled them to the back of

the photo. So simple, easy and FUN!

My awesome teammate made this honeycomb with her class to

showcase their writing about bees.  We've been

working with our students on learning to take notes while reading nonfiction 

as well as watching video clips. BrainPop Jr. and Discovery Streaming are 

perfect for this and we're lucky to have both!  

What's a garden without sunshine?  We made these arrays of sunshine 

from my friend Amanda Madden's FAB-U-LOUS blog Teaching Maddeness! 

We also made butterfly life cycle booklets to showcase all of our learning. 

I've wanted to pull our butterfly activities together into a unit for my TPT Shop

for a while now.  I'd love to make a companion to my Plant Life Cycle unit and

I've been tweaking this one for two years.  I just can't quite get it to be the way I want it yet!

These are some of the things we did while learning about the frog life cycle.  

I posted a few weeks ago about these little guys. You can see that post HERE.

I love it when our families come to visit.  It's so much fun to see them enjoying all of 

things their child is learning about!

Well, I'm over and out! I hope you all have some rest, relaxation and most of all, 

some fun planned for the summer!