Friday Flashback (on Saturday)

Well, it isn't Friday :) and I'm not sure this counts, but I'm linking up with Amanda at Teaching Maddness for:
 

Since school started, we have been talking about different ocean creatures. You can see my post about some of them here.
The first two full weeks of school, we were able to do lots of reading and learning about ocean animals. This week, not so much, because we started our reading series. So for a wrap up to the unit and a nice Friday afternoon activity, we drew and painted pictures of ocean animals. No photos - maybe I can add those Monday. I have to laugh, though. I asked the kids, "Do we see words written in the ocean?" Of course, they answered, "No." So I told them, "Don't put words in your drawing." Had at least one that did. Another of them colored her octopus in purple crayon. When I asked her why, she told me because she couldn't paint an octopus that good. Oh, well, mixed media.
Why do I think this activity is worth mentioning? Creativity! When my daughter was little, even up through and past 2nd grade, she had play dough, markers, colored pencils, crayons, scissors, paints, finger paints... etc, etc, etc. Now, she isn't afraid to try things, she gets cool ideas and thinks about finding answers from a different perspective.
I want to give my students a little bit of that. I'm pretty sure that there are some (or a lot) of them that don't even have crayons at home.
An open ended project like painting ocean creatures gives my students the chance to think and hopefully dream a little bit.

My other little thing I did this week involved our reading series. Our first story is the first Henry and Mudge story. My schedule has changed this year, and it has taken some getting used to. It feels like our reading block is just crunched. We come back from specials and have to start right away and lunch is on the other end, so we have to quit right away. Anyway, didn't get to the story as early this week as I was hoping. So we finished the story on Friday, and I didn't have time to do a paper and pencil graphic organizer, like I usually do. What's a teacher to do? I had them talk to their shoulder buddy about the Sequence of Events. I would tell them what page in the book to look at, and then have them discuss what main event happened on that page. Then I would say something like, "Hopefully you thought... was the main event." I think it worked good, and when they have to retell for their DRA, they have to do it orally, so good practice.
I'm glad that Amanda is doing this. It seems that I tend to remember what didn't go right :( instead of ALL the things that went OK.
Happy Weekend to you! The cooler temperatures we are experiencing is Great!