Five for Friday and a FREEBIE!!!

I officially started counting down the days left until the end of the school year...last week!!!  Seven days to go with the kids (They don't come to school on Friday)!  Then a week of home visits, and another week of paperwork and packing up my classroom, and the school year will be over!

I keep telling myself that I need to give as much energy and excitement to the happenings going on in our classroom as I did at the beginning of the year, but every day this gets harder and harder to do...

{One}  Last week, for one of our small groups, we taught the kids how to make a flower.  We discussed what shapes flowers can be in, and then let them have at it.  Then, we cut out the shape of their flower (as you can see, they're all different) and glued them onto a stem that we cut based on how tall they are.  We are going to glue something on the back that says "  This is how tall your child was in preschool 2013-2014" and take these to their families when we go on home visits.  Rather than do a Mother's Day gift - since we're not in school for Father's Day - this is their end of the year gift for their family.

We added the flowers to our bulletin board to make a backdrop for families to take pictures on the last day of school, as we are inviting them in that afternoon for a slide show and memory book project.

{Two}  This week, we read Dinosaurs Love Underpants and I planned a few activities that went along with the dinosaur theme, which the boys in my classroom absolutely LOVED!  I saved this unit for the end of the year because it is one of my favorites and I wanted to have some engaging activities that still kept the children interested in school.  The story gets them laughing every time, and I couldn't help but laugh too!  

I created this Dinosaur Number Match 1-10 activity specifically for this unit, which you can pick up FREE on TpT.  

The kids counted the number of dinosaurs, found the clothespin with the number written on it, and clipped it to the correct number on the card.  If you download the activity, please rate it and follow me on TpT.  I'm a fairly new seller, and would really appreciate the support!

{Three}  We have toy dinosaurs that have been in our classroom all year, and the kids love to play with them, especially the boys.  For this art activity, the kids dipped the dinosaur's feet into paint and walked or stomped a trail on the paper.  I had kids that never go over to the art table try this activity several times!

{Four}  Why read this story if we weren't going to decorate our own pair of underpants?  I found this Underpants Writing Activity on TpT last year when I taught kindergarten, and it's still FREE!  It's also easy to adjust to any grade level.  We just painted them with watercolor, and I wrote down what their favorite part of the story was, so we could hang our underpants out in the hall for everyone to see!!!  The kids got a good laugh out of that one!

{Five}  The last few weeks, we've been making cosmic suncatchers, which I found on the blog Babble Dabble Do.  We quickly found out it takes approximately 3-4 days for them to dry, so you either need to do them several at a time over a few weeks (we only had 5 lids) or ask for donations before doing this activity.  Also, 2-3 drops of food coloring is plenty!  The color does spread while the glue is drying, so you don't need much, but they turned out pretty cosmic, I would say.

Hop on over to Farley at Doodle Bugs Teaching to check out all of the other blogs participating in Five for Friday.  Thanks for reading!