Anyone Else Obsessed with the Eagles???

It all started when we read Little Miss Liberty a couple weeks ago. My firsties got a little obsessed with the Statue of Liberty.  Great!  This was a great way to work on some non-fiction reading and writing.  An idea started brewing in my mind about making a little non-fiction book with them about the Statue of Liberty  But then we got to talking about how she is symbol of our country and how there are more symbols.  So my kiddos got to talking and decided they wanted to do a little more reading and writing about eagles and the American flag as well.  Which expanded my book idea a little more...So that night I got online to do a little research of some online resources to use as well as to put together some poems for fluency and thats when I found the Decorah Eagles!  It was a Live broadcast of their nest and their three little precious eggs that were about to hatch.  I was instantly obsessed.  So, naturally I introduced my kiddos to them on Monday.  We watched all week and got to witness one of the eaglets make their way into the world!  It was A--Mazing!!!  (By the way, I am now officially on Spring Break-woohoo!-and I am still watching that nest...all 3 eaglets have hatched!!) http://www.ustream.tv/decoraheagles


Anyways, here is the book that we worked on.  The kids did amazing!!!

Flag -love the pole on the wrong side!

A Few Covers

Cutest Eagle EVER!!

Decided to just draw Liberty's head!

We also did a Sci Fri activity about the color of the Statue of Liberty.  We started on Thursday by soaking some pennies in salt and vinegar and also laid some pennies on a vinegar soaked paper towel to see what would happened.  The kids were amazed at the results.  On Friday they put their green pennies in the salt/vinegar mixture to clean them.  My room was pretty stinky, but they were loving the experiment!

A vinegar/salt bath

Getting a bath after sitting on vinegar towel

Documenting the experiment

It was time to change the old St. Patrick's Day bulletin board with a spring project.  I usually have the kiddos make spring chicks, but since we were obsessed with the eagles, we decided to make a nest of 3 eaglets instead.  I thought they turned out pretty cute...especially the one with the messy nest!!

I totally forgot to share my Dr. Seuss Truffala trees from the beginning of March.  I was having a hard time finding a Dr. Seuss project that not everyone was already doing, so I tried to come up with something a little different.  We colored coffee filters with markers, sprayed with water, and let dry.  Then we cut out various sized circles and attached to the trunks that we colored with crayons.  Several of these ended up looking like true art that I would frame and hang up!  Loved them!

Even though it is Spring Break for me, I will still be working on a few projects (especially since we are going nowhere!!!  Boo!)  Our family calendar is slowly filling up with taekwondo, softball, volleyball, and baseball coming up so this may be the only good chunk of time I can tackle a few projects.  I am going to work on some time and money things,but have you seen the Writing Goals idea on Pinterest??  I so want to make it to use for the last part of the year!  My class has come a long way in writing-- partly due to help from my son's 1st grade teacher-love talking with other teachers and getting new ideas and partly from just taking a step back and assessing their needs!