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A School of Fish Facts

My teammate, Amy, who has a blog called
Literacy and Laughter came up with this great idea to make scrapbook paper fish. I love these fish! On the back of their fish, each child wrote a fish fact from our fishy facts chart. Enjoy this movie of our very unique school of fish.

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Pond Murals

We have been studying fish and their habitats. We worked cooperatively to make pond murals.
First each group decided what plants and animals to draw in their ponds...



Then they painted their drawings with watercolors...



Here are the finished murals...



These pictures don't do these paintings justice...they are amazing pieces of artwork hanging in our room. We are looking forward to visiting a real pond this spring to find all the plants and animals that we have learned about.

George and Abe

We have been reading a lot of non fiction and using the following glog to learn about George and Abe. We drew their pictures and we are working on collecting some facts about them.






president drawings and facts -

I met PW this weekend!!!

Help me Rhonda! This weekend I got to meet Ree Drummond!! Ree's blog, The Pioneer Woman, is one of my favorites. Every recipe that I have made of Ree's has been amazing!! Her cookbook is a must have and her new book is a great read about her life. She spoke just a few feet away from us and as you can see, Lily read her cookbook while we waited for our line letter to be called. When we met Ree she went crazy over Stacy's baby belly and I could barely speak.

Brian's 12th Birthday

After having a fever for 5 days, strep throat and missing 7 days of school...we finally got to celebrate Brian's 12th birthday with a sleepover. At 3:30am I threatened to separate them if they did not go to sleep...glad that I have Presidents' Day off to recover from this event.

I Love the Web Presentation

I presented at my district inservice day on Friday and wanted to share my presentation glog with all of you. You can find links to all of your amazing blogs at the I Love Blogging link on the glog.
Check out my eTech Conference presentation:
That's What I'm Bloggin' About.

Stylish Blogger Award

Thank you to my skyping/blogging buddy Mrs. Wood and
Miss Snowden for this award! I love your blogs! Mrs. Wood we talk about your class often and can't wait to skype you again soon.

Here are the rules for receiving this award:
1. Thank and link back to the person who awarded you this award.
2. Share 7 things about yourself.
3. Award 5 recently discovered great bloggers.
4. Contact these bloggers and tell them about the award.

7 things about me:
1. This is my 21st year of teaching and I love my job!
2. Kindergarten writers amaze me on a daily basis.
I love Writing Workshop!
3. I am so lucky to live and teach in a community
that values education.
4. Diet Coke runs through my veins.
5. When I am not teaching I am on my computer, reading,
stamping or driving my mom taxi.
6. I have 3 incredible sons, but feel like I live in a frat house:)
7. I love to get comments and follow who is visiting my blog.

There are so many blogs that I love, but here are my 5 picks...
Off 2 Kindergarten (my teammate)
The First Grade Sweet Life (love the recent farm activities download!!)
Football Nut (my fellow blogger who is also a mom of 3 boys)
Art Projects For Kids (art project that will inspire your teaching)
Teaching Gracefully (a new blogger to check out)

Check out my collection of bloggers HERE.


One Last Valentine Post

Dandy Candy Heart Game
The students filled in the game board with the numbers from 2-12 (a little extra writing numbers practice). On your turn you roll 2 dice, count or add the dots and place a heart on that number. If there is already a heart on the number you roll, your turn is over. To win, you have to be the one to cover the last number.




Candy Hearts dice game -

Our Valentine's Day Party

We had a blast during our Valentine's Day party! We hunted for cupid's arrows, guessed how much candy we thought was in a jar, made animals and flowers out of hearts, made hearts out of candy canes and ate big, pink heart cookies. Thanks to all the parents that helped organize our party!!
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Presentation Help

I teach in a Preschool through 4th grade building. I am working on a technology presentation for our inservice day this Friday. Part of the presentation is sharing all of your amazing blogs with my colleagues. Please click on this link to
MY DISTRICT WEBSITE and look for your blog in the different grade level categories.

Send me a link to your blog if you can't find yourself or let me know if I have you in the wrong category. I would really love to fine some more 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade blogs, so please let me know if any of your colleagues have blogs that I can add.

A big thank you to all my blogging friends for helping me with this project!!!

How to Build a Snowman


Kindergarten writers are amazing! We recently wrote how-to stories about how to build a snowman and used construction paper crayons to create our covers. I love how these turned out and was so impressed by my little writers and illustrators. I wish I had the time and patience to upload everyone's stories, but here are 3 for you to enjoy.
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Snowmen at Night

We read 
 painted pictures and wrote about what our snowmen would do at night.
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I've gone bloggin' crazy

OK, I need to clean my house, do some laundry, take care of my children...but all I think about doing is reading blogs. My name is Jonelle Bell and I am a bloggoholic! I love so many of your blogs and feel like we are all connected by our enthusiasm and passion for what we do. Last year when there weren't as many of us, April Larremore from Chalk Talk and I started emailing and giving shout outs to each other on our blogs. Well today, because of a Skyping project we are working on (more on this later) I not only got to speak to April, but I also got to see her. This was so exciting and will make it a little less freaky for April when I show up on her doorstep one day:)

I have organized all of my favorite
February bloggin' favs on

Find out more about Sqworl bookmarking HERE.

Solid Shapes Guessing Bags

We have been practicing identifying solid shapes. To end this unit we identified these shapes, recorded them on the Smartboard to use as a reference, reached our hands into numbered bags and recorded what shape we were feeling. This was the quietest activity and everyone was on the edge of their seats waiting for each bag to come around to them. After the big reveal William said, "That was the best math lesson you have ever taught!" Thanks William...it only took me 103 days:)




solid shapes guessing bags

The Story of Snow

I love the nonfiction book, The Story of Snow. The leveled text makes it easy to read as much or as little about snow that you want to. We read the bold simple text and used the more involved text, in smaller print, to answer questions that came up. After we read the book we recorded some information about snow in our science notebooks, drew snowflakes with oil pastels and painted over them with watercolors. The idea for the paintings came from one of my favorite blogs,