The Teaching Reef: Superheroes have arrived and classroom happenings

Well FINALLY- that is all I have to say. After much persistence and patience the superhero units are uploaded on to my TpT store. My husband was dragged into this dilemma and so he got into the superhero spirit whether he liked it or not! Check us out! We had to do something to pass the time as we tried and re-tried to get this unit uploaded! The template for the masks we are wearing is part of the unit!

Here is a photograph of the superhero masks.

As I had mentioned before I made one HUGE (147 pages) unit with everything superhero that my brain could possibly create and then 2 mini units that might be a better option for some of you. All I did was break the huge unit into 2 separate and logical units. However I will let you know that I discounted the huge unit by $1.00 so it is a super deal! =) I really tried to accommodate everyone's needs when making this unit. Below is a preview. The first photo will take you to the superhero clarifying unit, the second photo will take you to the superhero read aloud unit, and the last few photos will take you to the huge superhero unit, all of which are in my TpT store.

I also wanted to talk about the author of the books that I used in this unit. I love, love, loovveeee Amazon. I could spend hours going to books that I see interesting or would be a cute idea for a unit. Well that was just the case when I came across this young author. Her name is Rachel Yu and she is pretty darn amazing. She is only 14 years old but has published a hand full of books. You can check out her books {here}. She also has a blog where she posts things about her books or things she is working on. Its called Rachel's Book Corner and you can click on the name to visit her sight. The books that I purchased from her are shown below and I am very pleased with them. The craft she uses is great and not to mention they are cute and beautifully illustrated.

Okay so on to this week. We kept up our traveling the world theme and we first watched a video on Brain Pop Jr. called Oceans and Continents. Our students really enjoy Brain Pop Jr. and I do too. My school has purchased a license to it so we can use all the videos our standards will allow us to! =) After that we wanted to connect it to life cycles since that is where we need to head in science so I found this amazing website that has tons of free worksheets. It is called The Great Grub Club. They have a worksheet that allows the students to find fruits and vegetables from around the world. It's great. Check it out below and if you click on it you can download your own copy from the website and much much more. We are going to continue our fruit life cycle this week!

Then once we knew where the fruits were from we did an "observe and discover" kind of lesson where we let the students describe the inside and outside of each fruit. This helped them learn about the different seeds inside/outside each fruit. Check out the fruits we looked at.

Then the following day we let the kids create a fruit salad with 3 different fruits. They had to fill out an organizer that we created so it was completely academic. The students were really excited about this because some of them have never eaten some of the fruits that were on the menu. Click the image below to get your own copy.

Last but not least on Friday we did a little more Brain Pop Jr. to learn about Earth Day. After we watched the Earth Day video our school collected Publix bags to decorate and return so that Publix customers can take home a bag and celebrate a little Earth Day too! I forgot to take a picture of this! Sorry about that but take my word for it, they turned out pretty cute! Then we ate Earth Day cupcakes. They thought they were delicious and Earthy! lol! I did take a picture of these.