I LOVE Whales! (and my first freebie!)

Summer makes me think of the ocean since we spend so much time at the beach - especially since my children are at prime beach age. I'm so blessed to live here in Honolulu, where basically it is beach weather all year long. *Yay!*

When I think of the ocean, I think of whales. I LOVE WHALES! I love going to look for the humpbacks and their calves each winter season.  This week, a pod of Orca were spotted off on the west coast. This was the first time Orca have been seen in Hawaiian waters in several years, so naturally it got everyone excited.  It made me think of my ocean/whale unit that I do with my students each year.

One of the activities in the unit is to look up the sizes of a variety of whales and chart their measurements on a graph.  Then, so the children can actually SEE how long that is, we go out and use yarn to measure how long that would be on our playground or in our courtyard.

We compare our actual life size graph to see just how big the whales are.  Then, as a bonus activity, we try to find out how many first graders long a blue whale is!  (Here's a hint: You're going to need a class of over 20 kids, unless you have some pretty tall kids in your class!)

As much as they complain about laying on the grass, the first graders really love this activity and I do to!  I'm including the graph here as my gift to you. It's nothing fancy, but I'm working on it! =)

Click here to download.

Have a wonderful weekend and God Bless!

Aloha,
-Jenn-

Summer Rain = Rainbows!

What I love about rain in the summertime are the rainbows that accompany them. No matter how many I've seen in my lifetime, I count myself blessed with every one I see.

This brings me to reminisce about a water unit I did...

We started with a web of ideas and what comes to the mind of a first grader when they think of water. We got a lot of great ideas our water brainstorm!

They then took their ideas and wrote a sentence telling us about the importance of water.  They then put their sentence on a raindrop cut out and illustrated it.  We added it to our window display along with a rainy day poem for the wet month of April.

This is a great project to use during any rainy season. Even if yours is during the summer!

Aloha!

-Jenn-