Plants and Some Word Work

We have had a crazy week! We did our final round of MAP testing this week and I'm so proud of my kiddos!  It was amazing to see how hard they were working!  Some of my high kids were presented with multiplication and division during the math portion, and their little pencils were just flying all over their scratch paper trying to figure out what to do!  This was our first year of MAP testing with kindergarten, and at the beginning of the year I thought the whole thing was going to be a complete fiasco, winter was a little better, but watching them take their spring tests, I am blown away.  We also started our spring benchmarking for DIBELS.  
 
With all of the testing going on, we have had a hard time getting to our learning about plants, but here is some of what we have done so far...
We observed dry kidney beans and then wet kidney beans.  After our observations we disected them, drew them, and labeled the parts.

We talked about what seeds need to grow. We also began our bean sprouting experiment.  

Wetting our paper towels to provide water for our bean.

Fitting that wet paper towel into a sandwich bag is trickier than it looks!

Hung in a hallway window to provide sunlight  for our beans.

We also started our observation journals.

"My seed is shaped like a rainbow. It's a wet bean."

"The seed looks like a banana."

"Takes the seed 8 days." (One of my ELLs predicting that it will take 8 days to sprout.)

Here is the cover that will go on our journals when we assemble them tomorrow. Simple, but it gets the job done!

We also started our Plant People today.  Awhile back I found this picture on pinterest...

Source: Pinterest via Carolyn from The Teacher Wife

When I followed the link, I was bummed to find out that the download was no longer available :(  With all the copyright craziness going on, maybe Mr. Potato Head had to come down, but I was in love with the idea, so here's what I created to use instead...

We didn't put shoes on, and I'm not sure if we will add them or not, but they are there if anyone wants them.

Adding our seeds.

Gently watering our newly planted grass seed.

In all of our planting fun, I forgot to take pictures of their plant people with the parts on.  I'll try to remember to snap a few tomorrow.


And finally a bit of word work.

I wanted a bit more practice with our color words after our rainbow words, so I created Can You Build It?  This one is just color words and has a recording sheet to practice writing their words after they build them. We did rainbow writing with ours.

You can find this freebie at TPT. 

If you download it, I would love some feedback!  I am thinking about creating some more for number words and our end of the year sight words.  If you think these or other versions would be useful in your classrooms, leave me a comment and let me know.  Also, if you have other ideas to extend this idea, let me know!