Watermelon Fun Product Swap

First of all...I have a love/hate relationship with technology. I have been teary-eyed most of today because my external hard drive was acting stupid. THE same hard drive with all my TN stuff, TPT stuff, MY GRAD SCHOOL PROJECT, everything......so anyways...got it figured out. Thank goodness...it's been a tough day. Now to the fun stuff! :)


 I signed up to do the product swap over at Jessica's blog a while back.

  

I was partnered up with Gwen from Learning With Mrs. Brinn for this product swap. I chose to work with her Wild About Watermelon unit. 


This unit is great! It starts off with a circle map all about watermelons and what students already know. It also includes bubble maps, writing activities, counting, cvc word practice, graphing, place values, rhyming, and so much more.

I chose to do two of the activities in my small groups. The first one was with my math small groups. It was using her booklet patterns to make addition books. I chose to use construction paper for each page instead of students coloring because well time is a factor.

Here are a few that we worked on. Unfortunately the lighting in my room is horrific for pictures so bear with me on a couple of these later in the post!

It just so happened that I had a few kiddos out the day that I did this, so these kiddos were the lucky ones to use the ink pad to make seeds. If the others had been there, they probably would've just drawn seeds because I had only one black ink pad. 

We rolled a dice and stamped and wrote the first number. Then someone rolled again and stamped and wrote the second number. Then they would add of the seeds and write the answer.

They absolutely loved this activity!!

While these kiddos were working on math, the other small group was with my TA working on literacy activities. I had her use the letters from the word WATERMELON to make words. 

 Here they made the word ME.

 This would be the terrible picture but the word is watermelon. Sorry about that.

 There are recording sheets included in the packet to write all of the words that they made on. 

 I loved doing these activities and the kiddos did too. They were so excited when they could read all of the words they made. I had one little girl run up and want to read each word. I took a picture and now it's missing off of my phone. GRR technology has not helped me out much the past couple of days.


One other activity that I wanted to do but the books were not in our library was the Venn Diagram comparing the books The Enormous Watermelon and The Enormous Potato. I'm going to try and do that next week after I go to my local public library and see if they have those books.

We also get healthy snacks for each classroom 3x a week and it just so happened that watermelon was one of our snacks this week. So it was a great follow-up to the unit.

The great thing about this unit is that you can use for Back to School activities or End of the Year activities. We are definitely not finished with using this unit. I'm going to work with some more things out of here, especially on the last days of school where you are not quite sure what to do with them (the students that is!). Does anyone else have days like that...or is it just me?


Make sure you head over to Gwen's blog and say hello and stop by her store to pick up the Wild about Watermelon unit!!