Miss Me Much?

Happy November!

Life is moving super fast and I feel like Abby when I want to "STOP THE WORLD!" 

However, I want the world to stop for a couple reasons:

1. To have the time to complete everything on my long list of things to do.

2. Because I am exhausted! I need a break, man. My hair is falling out in chunks and I can only think this is happening because my body is slowly falling to pieces! I'm waiting for my eyeball to pop out or maybe my brain will leak out of my ear while I sleep.

During my hiatus from Blogsville, I swear I've been teaching... really. We've spent the past two weeks working on our Farm unit and boy am I glad we did. My kids knew NOTHING about farms and farm animals. I was either cracking up or shaking my head at the lack of knowledge. We culminated our unit with our first field trip to a local farm.

There are a TON of great resources out there for teaching about farms. I ended up with too many activities and had to file some away for next year! You can go to TPT and pick up Deanna Jump's Farm unit and Michelle Oake's Farm unit.  Or hop on over to Welcome to Room 36's Blog and grab some of her fabulous ideas and creations.

Before we started our unit, I used Abby's fabulous Mystery Box lesson to grab their attention, introduce inferences, and learn a little new vocabulary.

Best $4 you'll spend on TPT!

They L-O-V-E-D this activity! I left the Mystery Box out in front of the room for everyone to see first thing in the morning. We didn't actually do the activity until the afternoon, so they were driving me nuts asking about it. Needless to say, the anticipation was pretty high by the afternoon.

First, the kids felt the box to get an idea of the weight of the object.

Then, I split them into teams and gave them their next assignment.

I would give each team four clues that they would need to record on their sheet. I wrote the clues easy enough for them to read on their own or they could sound it out. *If they really tried!

After all of the clues had been written on their sheets, we read them aloud. Then, the teams were to make a prediction based on their inferences as to what was inside the box.

After the teams made their predictions, we met on the rug to do the big reveal!

I had a few teams make the correct prediction and the other predictions were pretty interesting...

The tension was thick in the room as I opened the box!

It was a horse!

{I couldn't find my cow stuffed animal, so this was the next best thing.}

The teams were so excited and shocked.

Last, the teams worked together and completed a response sheet.

Their answers were so sweet! One little guy (let's just say, he doesn't usually put forth much effort) wrote four sentences to describe how he felt. Yee-Haw!

They were so thrilled to do this activity they CLAPPED at the end.

Really?? Too Stinkin Cute!