Open House

I love Open House. It's my favorite event. My school is pretty low key about Open House but I like to have fun with it. This year it was so late, we only have 9 days left of school (yay) and 1st grade about did me in, so we only did a few projects.

We've been studying all about plants and insects, one of my favorite themes because they go so well together.

We made this foldable flower book by Linda Kamp. I loved it but it was a lot of work. This kiddo did a great job on his. The hardest part was gluing the petals around the yellow center. They had to be evenly spaced and there were no guidelines. I will have to fix that.

We planted lima beans. But only half sprouted. I gave each child 3 beans, I figured one was bound to sprout. I guess some of us don't have green thumbs. We also did the sprout houses and those didn't sprout either. Hmmm....gardening is not our talent, hah hah.

Anyway, after we planted our lima beans, we wrote about the sequence of planting and used Hadar's cute little Garden Buddies. Loved the way they came out. You can see who is still having a little difficulty with fine motor skills. The blackline where they did their writing came from 1st Grade Hip Hip Hoorays' packet about plants.

This little garden buddy seems to have a 'Johnny Appleseed' thing going on with his hat. Not sure what happened to his hand or top of the shovel. There's always casualties when you do these types of projects.

This last one I did at the last minute. As in that afternoon and 45 minutes before the parents came in, I was painting branches on the bulletin board paper. Somehow it always gets done.

 This is a great way to see who understood how to write the time. They wrote about their favorite time of the day. Lots of them like recess, of course. 

We also made an insect book. We wrote interesting facts about several different insects and drew pictures to illustrate those facts. I didn't take any pictures of the booklets but we used this insect unit and butterfly life cycle packet here.The kids really enjoyed making this booklet. I tried leaving out some of the insects because of time, but they wanted to write about all of them. How could I turn down that enthusiasm?? lol! Anyway, the kiddos enjoyed sharing their projects with the parents and the parents loved their work. A successful night.