4th Grade Prayer Partners- Saint Kateri Native American Craft

Since we are a Catholic school, we get to meet with our prayer partners (the big kids at school) at least once a month to complete a religious activity. Our class gets to work with the 4th graders because I have many students with siblings in 4th grade. Our prayer partners also sit with us when we go to mass and come to read to us (and eventually WE read to THEM!) a few times a month. My kiddos LOVE their prayer partners and love giving them hugs and waving to them every time we pass them in the hall. I also love seeing former students who I would not expect to be very nurturing rise to the occasion and work so well with a little kindergartner. Long story short- I love prayer partners!! 

Tomorrow, Kateri Tekakwitha, the first ever Native American saint will be canonized by the Catholic Church. In order to celebrate this exciting new saint, we worked with our prayer partners to make little Saint Kateri crafts. Of course, we were so busy I forgot to take pictures :( The website we got the idea from has pictures though so I will upload those since ours looked essentially the same as hers. What I love about this craft is that you can do this even if you are not Catholic- it can easily be made for Thanksgiving or for a Native American study.

 Now we did not make the vests, just the headbands due to time constraint but I thought I would post the pics of the vests anyway since they are so cute and maybe someone else will be able to do them. The headbands came out so cute-- I wish I had remembered to take pictures!! 

We found this idea through Catholic Icing, a website that has great ideas for Catholic teachers or Catholic Sunday School teachers. The website has step-by-step directions on how to create these if you would like to create your own.

Now I am off to go look at potential wedding reception venues!!! Have a great day :)

Apples, Apples, and more Apples! Oh... and a Freebie too! :)

This week we have been learning all about apples- one of my favorite things to teach about! Tomorrow we are making our class applesauce and I am so excited I can already taste the cinnamon! So far this week we have read Apples by Gail Gibbons, Ten Apples Up On Top by Theo Lesieg, Ten Red Apples by Pat Hutchins, and The Story of Johnny Appleseed by Aliki. Today we graphed our favorite of those four books and Ten Red Apples won! This was funny to me because the copy we have in our school library looks about 50 years old and I was assuming my little kinders would judge the book by its cover (literally!) and not like it. They proved me wrong though!! Here is our graph:

 

I printed pictures of the covers of the books from the internet to put at the bottom of our graph. It took all of ten minutes but made our graph much cuter :)

Earlier in the week, after reading Ten Apples Up On Top, we used 10 apples to make an apple pattern on two large pieces of white construction paper. My wonderful assistant die cut 150 apples in red, green, and yellow for them to choose from while making their patterns. When they were done, I took pictures of them acting like they were balancing 10 apples on top of their heads. They had so much fun looking at their silly "balancing" pictures!

 

We also made the apple glyphs from my Full Year of Glyphs unit on TPT. I edited the directions a little bit for this one in order to fit our time limit that day and my students needs. Here they are below:

 

All week we have been tasting several foods that are apple flavored or are made from apples. We have been filling out the paper below as we go to document whether we liked the foods or not:

 

You can download this for FREE at my TPT store. Are any of ya'll teaching apples this week?? What are you doing to add a little extra fun into your lessons?

Dental Health Month

Ok well I finally got around to posting our Dental Health pictures! One of the many activities we did was an idea I saw on the blog "The First Grade Parade". We read the story "What Does the Tooth Fairy Do With All Those Teeth" and created little tooth fairies to go along with our writing prompt. They turned out so cute!!

 "I think he turns them into golden teeth for people" I LOVE that this one was a male tooth fairy- too cute!

"I think that she turns your teeth into dust"

 This one is a little blurry but it says "I think she finds out what kind of teeth they are"

I had cut out the major parts of this craft for them and then let them decorate their own faces and make their own hair. I loved how creative some of them were!

End of January/Beginning of February Fun

Here are a few of our activities we have done the past few weeks. There will be plenty more to come before Valentine's Day

This is our snowman glyph. I saw the idea on Pinterest and then changed it a little.

Our Valentine's Day Glyph

Finished product of Valentine's Day Glyph!