Elementary Matters: camping theme week

It's been another fun week in second grade! This week was Camping Week (see THIS blog post), and boy oh boy, did we have fun!

Camping Friday! We celebrated our learning all week with a camping theme. See what we did!

The children read loads of camping books, listened to nature sounds,

played learning games

did loads of writing, played "camping math" scoot, and had a wonderful week!

I'm so glad I did camping week! Here are some pictures:

1. I brought in the little pink tent my daughter had when she was little. It became a great place for reading books about camping!

2. I brought in my little travel camping table. The kids used it for reading as well as playing games!

3. So many kids brought in sleeping bags, it looked like a big pajama party!

4. After Friday afternoon's special, there was a little treat waiting for the children.

5. Yes, that's my REAL camping tent in the classroom. We found out we could squeeze the whole class in my tent!

The s'mores and the tent made their day! And, honestly, the smiles on their faces made my day!

It was a great week!

It also inspired me to make a new resource, based on most of the activities we enjoyed this week.

Somehow I have to make it through 8 more school days and one more teacher workshop day. After a week at the beach and a week camping, next week's theme will be "fun at home".

We'll be spending most of the week remembering all the fun stuff we did this year and planning fun stuff to do this summer.

What do you do during those challenging last few weeks when the kids struggle to pay attention to anything?

I've been having another great week with my students! We are celebrating camping this week, and it's been grand fun!

Camping Theme Week! Here are some ideas for turning your classroom into a camping area, and make learning and reviewing skills fun!

As with any unit of study, I start with plenty of good literature:

I happen to own some camping gear, so I brought that in to show the kids. I also encouraged the children to bring in flashlights and sleeping bags. They are having a blast during reading time. They crawl right into the sleeping bags and read with their flashlights. Don't you love working with kids with imaginations?

Another thing I found in my cellar: one of these little tents from when my daughter was little. (Yes, I know, I really need to clean out the little kid toys from my cellar, she's 20!)

It's super easy to set up, and the kids absolutely love it! It set the scene for our camping theme, and it a great place for reading or playing a learning game!

Of course, most of our classwork at this point is review work, so we're working on writing camping stories, squeezing in camping ideas in math, reading, and even science and social studies!

We're learning camping safety and loads about the animals in the woods!

Here's one of my most popular resources, the Buggy Syllables game, which my students absolutely love! I love it because it's great practice for decoding multiple syllable words!

The above resource is included in my Camping Learning Bundle! I'm real proud of this one! It has a ton of activities to practice literacy and math skills, and since it has the camping theme, it makes everything more fun!