Batty for Bats!

Batty for bats!!!  This week we are just loving these furry little mammals!  It's Halloween week and we have been spending our time reading and devouring facts about BATS!

Here are a few fun SafeShare songs that my kids LOVE, LOVE, LOVE!

Beware, you will be sining Echo, Echo, Echolocation! After you view this cute little JumpStart song!!

After we researched and learned all sorts of fun things about Bats we started practicing sorting facts from opinions!  We practiced this all last week with our spider research so it was a fun way to continue practicing.  My kiddos did an amazing job of taking their opinions and supporting them with facts!  

 In math we are working on surveys and bar graphs, so of course we had to take a survey about bats!

Do you think bats are cool or spooky?  COOL won by a landslide!

The bats they created turned out super cute and are hanging all around our classroom making everything look very spooky and decorative for Halloween!  This cute little bat even made his way into my guided reading tree!

Check out my brand new Batty for Bats Opinion Writing Unit!  It comes with everything you need to take all your bat research to the next level! 

As always, thanks for stopping by!  Happy Halloween everyone!! 

Fun Spider Fact and Opinion Writing with Freebies!

All week we have been having such fun reading and researching all about spiders!  One of the best books I found was a National Geographic Kids book with awesome text features and full color photographs!  We cleared out our library of all their non-fiction spider books and dove right in!   I found some great spider freebies on the Kidzone website to supplement our learning.  My kiddos had a blast learning about our 8 legged friends.

After all our research, we used Amy Lemons cute little power point freebie to practice seeing the difference between facts and opinions!  This was the perfect activity to help bridge the facts that they had learned and their thoughts and feelings about spiders.

After our whole group lesson on facts and opinions, students worked in pairs to sort their research sentences into facts and opinions.  After students sorted their sentences, they wrote their first opinion pieces and created cute spiders to decorate our room just in time for Halloween! Their writing turned out great and they were so excited to create the spiders!!

Click below to pick up my Spider Opinion Writing Freebie! 

Next week we are going to focus our research on Bats!  I just love this time of the year...

A Safe way to use YouTube in the classroom

Who doesn't love YouTube?  There are so many great educational videos out there.  I love finding songs, brain breaks, book read alouds and even the occasional indoor recess movie!  What I don't love about YouTube are the ads that pop up after the videos!  Yikes,  they can be so distracting and occasionally they are down right inappropriate!

So, what's the solution?  Safe Share. SafeShare.TV is a simple website where you insert your youtube link and Safe Share gives you a SafeShare.TV link that eliminates all those distractions.

http://safeshare.tv/faq/english 

Here's how to create a SafeShare link in 3 easy steps:

1. Copy the link of the YouTube video you want to SafeShare.

2. Open SafeShare.TVand paste the link from YouTube into the box in the middle of the page.

3. Click on the green, General Safe Link button and a the click the red link to safely view your video in a new window.  You can copy and share that link in emails, power points, and documents.  

Bonus, you can click on Customize video and edit how much of the video you would like to see.

Here is the SafeShare link for this cute little Adaptation video that I found on YouTube!

Here are a few of my favorite SafeShare (YouTube) videos:

Echolocation - cute song with catchy tune!

Continent Song - I love the graphics and photos in this video and the song is so easy to sing, the kids will be singing their continents in no time.

Bruno Mars sings Don't Give Up with some Sesame stars!  I love showing this to my little guys and reminding them to work hard everyday!

Friends of Ten is a cute little song about all the combos of making the number ten! This has been great for the beginning of the year in 1st grade!  

What are your favorite classroom YouTubes?  Please share below and check out SafeShare for yourself!  Oh yeah, did I mention that it's FREE?  Gotta love that!!