Vegas...I wish I was there!

Hi!
Everyone is going to the TPT Conference in Vegas. My daughter is going with my husband. They are so excited, planning lots of fun stuff!    Me...., I am not going this year, waaaaa! but I AM going next year.  Not missing the fun and excitement again! I do have too much going on this year, teaching summer camp and then going on a cruise for vacation, but really, really, really want to go next year!! I want to go to the I Teach K conference as well.  It should be so awesome!
I am so psyched for my husband and daughter to have a fun weekend together though. My daughter will be attending the conference tomorrow. She's got her workshops all planned out. Later they will go to dinner and then to a show.  Nice father/daughter bonding time. :)
I can't wait to hear all about it and live vicariously through them! It should be great!
Looking forward to reading all the great blogs from my favorite bloggers as well. I'm hoping my daughter gets a chance to meet them. I want to see lots of pictures! Have fun everyone!!

Our Last Centers of the Year; Buggy Centers

I am finally getting around to posting my last group of centers.  We did our Bug Centers which the kids LOVE! They couldn't wait to come in to school every day to do the next rotation.

I follow Megan Shea's Center schedule using 4 different centers (her centers usually consist of 5 centers and a Monday thru Friday schedule, but being as we did this right after Memorial Day and had only 4 days to do it, I shortened it to 4 centers and beefed them up a bit.

Center 1~  Buggy For CVC Words which had 2 different CVC activities . (We also did a great writing project with this center. It was something like~what would you do if you woke up and you were a caterpillar.  Sorry, no pics of that but we got some great writing out of the kids.  They were writing sentences like; I woke up and I was fat and furry.  I had so many legs so i decided to crawl up my sister's leg......  I loved it!!

Center 2~ Bug Project: They were able to choose one or both of these, most kids wanted to do both.  The choices were to create a ladybug or bumblebee.  Using the tracers to complete the project on their own.  They are using the sample as a guide.

Center 3~ Buggy for Math; Stamp, write and draw.  Sort of self explanatory with the picture, but they loved this one too!  There are differentiated numbers in Megan's Centers so you can use whichever one you need for where your kids are at in math.

Center 4~ Bug Book and Bug Rubbing;  The kids finish the sentences in the book and add their illustrations.  Once they are done, they read it to me.  They love adding their own words and are quite creative with this.  Once they are done, they do bug rubbings of their choice and write a sentence underneath.

The kids love these centers and I love them as well.  They have fun doing them, while learning about bugs the whole week.  Each day during the bug centers, I read a different bug book that I have in my library and they learn different facts from the books.  By the end of the week, I see different writing than I did at the beginning of the week.  It is so awesome.  I also do a sharing after each day for the kids to see what happened in the centers they were not at that day.  This gets the anticipation up for the next day and they literally walk in the door in the morning and ask when we are starting centers!  

Here is the link to Megan's buggy centers.  Megan Shea, who just so happens to be my daughter; is unbelievably talented and it wouldn't hurt to check out her store on TPT. I use all of her stuff in my room and have gotten tons of compliments from the parents about it!!

Megan Shea's Buggy Centers  Megan Shea's Weekly Buggy Centers 

Either one of those links will get you to Megan's store.  I use a combination of her centers in my class.  You can decide which ones you like, both are excellent!

Have fun with bugs!  Hope your kids like them as much as mine did! :)