Happy Valentine's Day!! I hope everyone lived through the sugar and chaos every class party seems to bring! This year my team has been sending home monthly "home projects" to have the students work on with their families. We have found this to be important because many of our students do not recieve homework so we wanted to make sure they still sat down at least once each month to work on something with their parents. This gives them a chance to show off how hard they have been working on those fine motor skills! This month we had the kids make Valentine Boxes. I used this great letter from Jennifer at Empowering Little Learners  which cut down on the prep time on my end (what teacher doesn't love that?!). I was so pleased with a lot of our boxes and the kids were super excited to share what they made. Here are some pictures of their creations: Here are several of our boxes. This student had the cutest dog house box complete with a life-size replic......

We had a hard time this week finding a cute, predictable story to use for our polar animals theme. It was my first time doing this theme so I did not have my usual bag of tricks! We ended up using a Scholastic mini-book called, Are You Cold?, with lots of new polar animal names that my kiddos surprisingly didn't know. The walrus was called an ostrich more than once! Like I said it was our first time covering polar animals! The best part was the last page of the book had a slot that I could slip their pictures in to make them a part of the story. They LOVED this surprise ending! This week there was definitely no shortage of ADORABLE polar animal crafts! There were so many that all of my teammates chose something different. My two favorites were this too cute walrus craft made from painted paper plates, yarn, and plastic knives. Then, my students made this great ink blot penguin painting. Didn't they turn out so cute?! To give a visual for the kids so they knew......

Every fall we do a unit on apples. There are so many awesome apple activities and it is such an easy topic to integrate across subject areas.  Apple Art This year we tried two new art activities that incorporated art projects to accompany our apples unit. The first project we did was stained glass apple art using contact paper and tissue paper squares .  **This post contains affiliate links and I will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on my links. I only recommend products that I use and love!** I loved this activity because it was easily accessible for my student who struggles with fine motor control. I just had to hand him the tissue paper and point to where he should place it and then he would stick it to the contact paper. Typically if we do cutting or gluing activities, we have to work hand-over-hand so it was great to have an activity that promoted his independence. Putting the tissue paper on all by himself! The table easel helps him see ......