Tried It Tuesday: Dear Mr. Blueberry

I'm excited to share a super cute writing activity with you today for Fourth Grade Flipper's Tried It Tuesday linky party!

The activity I'm sharing with you today comes from Elementary AMC.  I love, love, loved her Persuasive Letter Writing activity and so did my students!

This writing activity goes with a cute book called Dear Mr. Blueberry by Simon James. Here is the description of the book from Amazon.com " It's vacation time, so Emily has to write to her teacher to help when she discovers a blue whale living in her pond. Mr. Blueberry answers that she must be mistaken, because whales live in the ocean, not in ponds. 
Throughout the summer, Emily and Mr. Blueberry exchange letters, until Emily has a happy surprise to share with her teacher. In the process, Emily learns a lot about whales. And Mr. Blueberry leans even more about imagination, faith, and love."

After reading the book, I gave each student a letter from Jane that is included in this activity. Each of these letters describe how Jane thinks she has a different animal living in her backyard. The students then have to use the facts from the letter to write their own letter persuading Jane that she doesn't actually have a lion, shark, elephant, etc. living in her backyard. 

Everything you could possibly need to teach letter writing and persuasive writing is included in this packet. My students had so much fun writing their letters back to Jane. In their final product I had the students draw pictures of their perspective of what was in Jane's yard and then of Jane's perspective. Here are a few pictures of the final projects!

Monday Made It and Flash Freebie!

This is my last full week of Summer Break :( I am hoping to get lots done this week though! I want to share just a couple of things I did last week so I'm linking up with 4th Grade Frolics Monday Made It!

First up is a vase that I spiced up. I don't know about you but I seem to keep all of the flower vases I receive and they all look the exact same. So I decided to try and spice one up! I just painted it with acrylic paint and then modge-podged over it so that water wouldn't take the paint off. Then I put modge-podge around the bottom and shook on some glitter! Now I have a cute vase to put on my desk to display the flowers that my students will have to bring me :)

Next up I made some Government Task Cards. As with all of my new products, they will be free in my store for the next hour or so! If you do download them, I would appreciate it if you left me some TpT back if you like them!

Link up with Tara at 4th Grade Frolics to show off what you have been creating!

Educents Back to School Sale Last Day!

I told myself I was NOT going to spend a lot this year on school stuff and then I got the Educents back to school sale email.

I bought the Math Bundle for Grades 3-5. It is FULL of awesome math activities! I broke down and ordered a color printer so I can't wait to start printing all my new goodies! This math bundle has 10 different math activities for only $10.99! That's a savings of 69%. I couldn't pass it up! Some of the topics covered in this bundle are fractions, multiplication, prime and composite numbers, line plots, decimals, and more!

I'm also debating buying the Full Year Curriculum Bundle for 3rd and 4th grade. It looks like it is full of some great activities too! Has anyone purchased this one? I need talked into it since it is a little more expensive!

These are just a couple of the bundles that are available right now at a huge discount so head on over and see what you can pick up! Today is the last day for the big sale!

P.S. For those of you that signed up to be a part of my upcoming giveaway...thank you, thank you! I'm going to hold off on that for a while though because there are sooooo many back to school giveaways going on right now. Once things settle down a little I will get it going though! Thanks!!