Fractions and Frogs and Pumpkins, Oh My!

This has been a busy last few weeks and there have been so many wonderful things going on! First off, we wrapped up our unit on fractions. The kids and I had a great time doing lots of the activities I found on TPT (gotta love all the wonderful finds on there, right?!?!), but our all time favorite was the Fraction Sundaes we created from Amy Lemons! (TPT Store) I absolutely love everything Mrs. Lemon's creates and have probably purchased half of her TPT store items already! Here is a photo of how our sweet fraction sundaes turned out:

We also wrapped up our unit on frogs! We have been learning about frogs officially since March, however, we have had a frog classroom theme all year. We took a few trips to our local vernal pool and were able to see frog eggs in the wild!

We also learned about the red-eyed tree frog and did a fundraising campaign our district calls Pennies for the Planet in which we spent two weeks raising awareness (and money!) for the red-eyed tree frogs and in the end made a symbolic donation to the World Wildlife Fund. Our class raised $205.60! Here's how Pennies for the Planet works:

1. As a class, we decide on an animal that is listed on the World Wildlife Fund website. (WWF Website)

2. We research this animal as a class and as a whole group write a feature article about this animal.

3. Share our information with the other classes in our building, then put change collection jars in each classroom and let families know we will be collecting change for two weeks and explaining why we are doing this and where the money goes.

4. At the end of the two weeks we collect all the money jars and sort and count the money. This is a great review of money! We share our total with the school.

5. During the two weeks of collection students choose another animal in this animal group(for example, we did the red-eyed tree frog, so the students all chose different kinds of frogs to research) and each student writes their own feature article.

6. All the feature articles are put together in a book and we created a frog display for each article as well. Check them out!

We also got to have an expert in the field come in and help my students write their own frog play which explained the life cycle of a frog and all about vernal pools! This was a GREAT unit!

Finally, we planted our pumpkins last week. We planted them on Friday and just one week later, look how big they are! I always do a pumpkin unit with my students in October using these pumpkins. Check back then to see all the fun things we do!