Five for Friday- Water cycle, Geography, and place value

Yep, I know it's Saturday...but I still really wanted to link up...

Hey there!  You know it's the beginning of the year when you feel like you don't even have time to breathe, let alone blog, right?  ;O) 

Is anyone else that's back to school feeling like this?

Millions of papers to fill out, assessments galore?  Ugh.  We are finally starting to get a "normal" schedule!!

So, here is what we have been up to this week!!  I'm thankful this linky with Kacey from Doodle Bugs Teaching allows us to talk about random things that we did!

We have been working on states of matter and the water cycle in science.  Here are some photos from our interactive notebooks.  For the flippables I used Erin's (from I'm Lovin Lit's) interactive notebook templates (which rock by the way!).

We have been working on geography in social studies.  We got out the big maps that can be used with expo markers and did a search for the landforms and bodies of water that we had been learning about.

We also used a game from Lynda Kamp's awesome geography pack and the kids had a lot of fun with it!

We made acrostic poems in LA for water and geography terms.  Here was my example...I of course forgot to take pictures of student examples...this definitely caused them to think!

 For a culminating project, we made United States cookie cakes (a cute idea from a teacher that I work with)!  The students had specific landforms and bodies of water that they needed to locate in the U.S.  These were places that they will be learning about throughout the year so we do this unit first so that they have an idea where everything is as we start learning the content.

 Using pre-made dough, you just cook the dough as one big long cookie.  Then, we had a cut out in the shape of the U.S. and you put that on top of the cooked cookie and cut around it to get the shape.  :O)

Here is the final product!

It's completely edible!  Talk about a sugar high!!

I am also linking this up with my sweet friend Joanne for her linky because I feel like cookie cake was pretty motivating!!  They knew they had to study to be able to put all of the items in the right place for the cookie cake and they all really did a great job!  Isn't food (especially cookies and candy) motivating for all of us?  ;O)

In math, we have been working on place value (up to the millions).  Stacia and I have worked really hard trying to make our math real-world applicable.  That being said, how often do we really use numbers to the millions??  As a teacher, unfortunately, I do not make millions of dollars so unless I win the lottery, I'll never see or write those numbers (on a check) in my lifetime.  ;O)

Anyway, we came up with the idea to use a theme of the movies for this nine week period in our math and it has kept the kids engaged!  Two great movies came out this summer that most of the kids have seen and so we have been using numbers from that in our discussion of place value!  We have been pasting this into our interactive math notebooks!  It's been fun!

These show how we used numbers from daily and weekly profits for both movies to teach standard and expanded form as well compare numbers and talk about the value of the digit.  :O)

 Phew!  No wonder I'm tried after this week!  We had a ton going on!  ;O)  But that's how I like it!!  :O)

Have a great weekend!
Amanda