We were fortunate enough to have four large concrete spaces by the garden area where benches used to be.  Ms. McGinley wanted our garden to be a literacy garden so she painted something different onto every space so that we could take our learning outdoors on really nice days.  This hundreds chart is a lot of fun to use with bean bags and whiteboards.  We throw two beanbags and make and addition, subtraction, or multiplication problem or we act lazy and just walk the numbers and count to 100.  Sometimes we jump across numbers so that we can skip count.  It is easy until you get to your fours and then it gets tricky.

This is the Candyland spot before the pictures were added.  Ms. McGinley has created cards to go with the area.  We have cause/affect, main idea, follow directions, and context clues.  It is a super fun way to do reading on a really nice day; especially when Ms. McGinley remembers to bring her delicious chocolate chip cookies.

This is our free choice area.  We use it to play scrabble with our spelling words and sight words.  Sometimes we get to play checkers on it at recess.  Ms. McGinley said it could be used for chess also, but since she doesn't know how to play...  she can't show us. 

As a classroom art project, we made stepping stones for all the story elements.  We have one for story retell, beginning, middle, end, characters, problem, solution, and favorite part.  The stones are done in mosaic art.  We used marbles, cut glass, buttons, cool glass treasures that looked like turtle, hearts, stars, ladybugs and other cool things.  We partner read books under the tree and then we walk down the path of stepping stones and retell the story. 

If your ever by our school you should stop and wander through our outdoor literacy garden.  You will love every minute of it.