Love for Life Cycles

Life Cycles in Action

My little owl scientists are LOVING our new Life Cycles Unit!  In a little over a week’s time, we have managed to grow some grass indoors, with no help from the storms and pouring rain outside, AND watch our butterfly larva transform into pupas!  Our friend from Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar, even crawled in this week to help us celebrate our author celebration AND life cycle study!

In my class, we’ve been reading and learning about life cycles for a little over a week, and we’ve been recording the different stages in the life cycles of many animals’ lives in these Interactive Learning Journals.  This is a product that I’ve worked on for the last few years, and I’m so happy to finally have them updated, and ready for other teachers to use, too!  FYI-  This packet does include recording pages and mini-anchor charts for plant life cycles too!

Life Cycle Interactive Journals UNIT

Before we take our Animal Life Cycles Test this week, we are going to review by enjoying this Animals Life Cycles SCOOT!  My kids LOVE getting up and roaming the room during SCOOT activities, and this resource includes a variety of different question types to monitor student understanding of life cycles!

Animal Life Cycles SCOOT

Finally, in class tomorrow, we’re going to be making a Life Cycles Museum with different animal life cycle craft-ivities to display our understanding of life cycles in the hallway!  I can’t wait to see how these turn out!

Life Cycle Crafts BUNDLE

This week we’re going to tackle the life cycles of pumpkins, flowers, and bean plants!  I hope to have some new resources for these up soon, too.  Until then, you can check out all of these AWESOME Life Cycle Resources in my TPT Store!

Hootfully Yours,

Lindsay, The Owl Teach

ARRAYS are Springing Up EVERYWHERE!

Spring has FINALLY sprung in Atlanta…and it has brought with it a week + of rainy days and more POLLEN than can be imagined…my kids haven’t been outside ALL week!  Thank goodness for GoNOODLE indoor recess and the relase of Pop Se Ko 2.0!  “My hands are high, my feet are low…BUT outside, outside, we can’t go!”

So, being stuck inside for some dreary days has meant I was desperate for some ways to brighten up our classroom and hallways…with bright paper and math crafts of course!  My sweet, second grade owls have been studying arrays, as an introduction to repeated addition and beginning multiplication.  I love this unit, because it is so hands-on and visual!  Based on second grade Common Core standards, we are really just working on repeated addition sentences, but of course, I have many students who were ready to write some basic multiplication sentences too! To fully master this standard, students are also required to partition rectangles into correct arrays, using equal shares!

We made Arrays of Sunshine after seeing the cute idea from Teaching with Maddeness. This activity is perfect for having students practice partitioning a rectangle into equal shares that model an array!

Then, we made skyscrapers, with “window arrays”…I LOVE how our Array City turned out!  This activity was perfect for students to see that there is usually more than 1 way to represent the same array!

Finally, we went on an Array Scavenger Hunt all over our school with our iPads.  I paired my kids up, had them search the school and “snap” quick pictures of real-life arrays.  After we finished our hunt, I had my kids import their pictures into the FREE APP- PicWall.  Through the use of PicWall, students were able to label all of their arrays with the correct corresponding repeated addition sentence.  Then, they sent me their finished projects using another FREE APP called  SHOWBIE!  By the end of the day, I had all of my students’ Array Hunt Projects in one place to check and print!  This was an AWESOME way to integrate technology AND for students to see that math truly is all around them.

Interested in a “low-prep” game for your students to practice using and identify Arrays during math centers or groups?  Check out this Arrays Memory Games in my TPTstore --there are actually 2 versions (multiplication sentences & repeated addition sentences) included in this set!  Two games for under $4.00--what a steal!

Hootfully yours!

Lindsay, The Owl Teach