Five for Friday - Money, Easter editing, Research and CHOCOLATE!

I really think this whole Five for Friday thing should be renamed "Six for Saturday."  I just do not know how anyone can get these out on Fridays - and yes, I know you can schedule your posts, but how am I supposed to write a post on Tuesday about my week if I haven't done it yet?  So, here we go with a little Doodlebugs linky (late again, of course) but still fun!

This is without a doubt my favorite picture from the week.

Yes, that is a chocolate fountain... with wonderful things to dip.  I may or may not have had fruit for breakfast... Every month one of our units hosts a breakfast for the staff.  This month it was the Instructional Assistants who fed us.  Oh my.  I love them... enough said.

We started our money unit this week.  Umm, excuse me people who put together the Common Core - can you please explain to me why money starts in second grade?  And they are supposed to be able to solve problems up to a dollar... when they DO.NOT.EVEN.KNOW.THE.COINS??  We spent lots of time this week learning to identify nickels, pennies and dimes and their values.  The foam dice helped.  They worked with a partner to roll the dice 3 times and take that number of pennies, nickels and dimes and then figure out the value. The partner with the greatest amount of money got a point and the first person to 10 points won.   I had to explain this was not a math equation and please do not write 5 + 25 + 30 on your board and try to solve it.  Sigh... I can tell you that by the end of the week we got much better!

We did a little editing with an Easter theme.  I have hardly done any Easter activities.  This year it just really snuck up on me.  This was a good way to get a little assessment as to what we still need to work on for the end of the year.  I can see that plural spelling patterns will be on our list.  If you'd like the editing activity, it's a freebie in my TpT store.  Just click HERE to get it.

I admit - this one is from last week.  We've been busy researching our famous Americans and writing informational texts, planning speeches and getting ready for our wax museum that we'll be opening this coming Thursday.  My kiddos are beyond excited about this.  They each researched a famous American and will dress up as that person.  Then they'll come to life when our visitors press a button on their hand.  This has been a great way to integrate topics - math, social studies, geography, reading, writing... you name it, we did it.

Another part of our research project is to create an interactive timeline, complete with videos of everyone dressed up as their person, telling about their life.  To get ready for this, we had to first practice making videos.  O.M.G.  They were hysterical.  The kids thought it was hilarious to see themselves and they noticed A LOT of things that needed to improve for the next time!  We created our top ten video tips that we discussed and implemented the next time around.  The second videos were sooo much better!  We are ready to videotape the famous American "chats" this week!

Next week is a four day week and then just one more week until spring break!  Have a great weekend!