TBT Water Stations

This is back from 2012. They changed our scope and sequence so it's not even this time of year anymore. In fact I'd forgotten about it. But if you can tweak any of it to use be my guest. Pretty easy and we had fun. At least now I'd be singing inside of mostly walls. You can still hear the hallway and if it's quiet they can hear us. But it's not as crazy as it was before! I was nerdily excited to have the author of one of the books we used comment. Sure she just had a Google Alert set up but anyway.


These are just a start but I thought I'd share. Second grade has been coming and doing some of these activities. No one finishes all of them but that's OK, too. Ideas to make them better? Comments, please!

(Nice bulletin board, no? But no. I didn't make it. Thank you to CC licenses and Flickr user MissKPrimary for sharing!)


First of all we started out singing (and, let me tell you, Ms. O is not particularly fond of singing in our library space with no walls, everyone in the school and their dog walking through, and having to use a microphone. Not fond at all. But the kids liked it) from the book There Goes the Water, by Laura Purdie Salas.

Vocabulary: this was an easy way to have them start a simple practice with an online dictionary. We made sure to discuss at the end of the activity what was easier and what was harder about a print versus an electronic dictionary. They totally got it. IF they spelled it perfectly the screen opened right to their definition. That's a big IF.

Storytime: I just picked out a bunch of different picture books that had something to do with water, rain, or snow. Kiddos filled out a story elements organizer.

Non-Fiction Text Features: I have a couple of series that we pulled relevant titles from. The only one I can remember off the top of my head is Bridgestone Books' Weather Update. We just finished talking (in the library, anyway) about text features so this was a good review. The table of contents and indexes are easy to find. Print size is pretty big and there are plenty of captions and pictures to look at.

Bookmark Making: I used the pattern found on Today in First Grade's blog (scroll down just a bit) and copied it at 50% (so that I could get two sets from one sheet of paper). I made a template with four squares (sorry ... don't have that one) that went down half of a sheet of paper set in portrait mode (again, so that I could get two from one sheet ... I copied those onto blue). I precut the snowman squares but you could have kids do that themselves if you're willing to deal with the mess.


So I started making a simple math one for average rainfall. But it never got finished. :/