Pumpkin Crazy

After the completion of our Pumpkin Unit, Indigo Farms might be interested in hiring on a few new pumpkin experts from our class.

We introduced pumpkins and the life cycle with the book From Seed to Pumpkin by Wendy Pfeller.

This book provides a great opportunity to work on sequencing.  As a class, we put the stages of the life cycle in order, starting with the seed.

The kids created their own 3D life cycle pumpkin to practice sequencing on their own.

We also read The Biggest Pumpkin Ever by Steve Kroll.

If you could've seen my reaction when I saw the pumpkin Savannah's mom brought into our classroom...HOLY PUMPKINS!  It was huge.  I thought this book would be a great way to begin making observations on size, weight, etc.

We began our pumpkin exploration with the three pumpkins donated to our class.  First, we predicted whether or not our pumpkins would float.  The majority of the kids predicted they would sink.

They were mighty surprised to see each pumpkin floating.  When we opened the pumpkins up we discussed what we found inside - seeds, pulp - but mostly, nothing at all - just air.

The pulp grossed out several of the girls, but I was pleased with how many of the kids were ready to get down and dirty.  Each table scooped out the pulp and separated out the seeds.

We grouped the seeds into piles of 10 and then counted them by skip counting.

We also measured our pumpkins with cubes to see how many cubes tall they were - it was no mystery which pumpkin was the tallest!

These were the results from our pumpkin exploration!

On Friday, we brought shapes into our unit by carving jack-o-lantern faces.  Triangles were the most popular choice!

We can't wait to pick our own pumpkins from the pumpkin patch at Indigo Farms!

This week's Star Student is Savannah Basile!

Savannah always demonstrate a friendly and kind demeanor.  She has a strong work ethic and really enjoys being at school.  She worked hard to earn her new Star Student status! :)

All About Leaves

While we're still seeing a lot of green on the trees, we made it our mission to find fall colored leaves this week.  We went on a leaf hunt behind the school, searching high and low for red, yellow, orange and brown leaves.  We were successful in finding every color, except orange.

 
Each child made a leaf book with the leaves they found on our hunt.  We created a sentence using sight words that we included on each page of our book.  The sentence frame we used was "I can see a __________ leaf."

In math, we have been exploring attributes of 2D shapes.  We observed the kinds of lines that make up the sides of different shapes.  We concluded that some lines are curved and others are straight.  We sorted shapes based on this criteria.

I finally remembered to take a couple of pictures of our poetry journals.  The poem we worked on this week was Little Miss Muffett.  Each week we read our poem together, tracking the print.  We find the letter of the week, rhyming words and sight words within our poem.  The kids then illustrate the poem in their journals.  They really enjoy reading them to each other too! 

A few weeks ago, I was asked to have an intern in my class.  Ms. Christine is a student at Coastal Carolina and is planning to pursue a career in education when she graduates.  She is assisting me in the afternoons on Mondays and Wednesdays and all day on Friday.  She is hoping to gain experience in the classroom and learn a few things in the process.  She will be with us until Christmas break.  If you see her in the classroom, feel free to welcome her and tell her hello! :)

Ms. Christine

www.scholastic.com/bookclubs

October Scholastic book orders went home last week.  All orders are due Friday, October 25th.  Don't forget - every order we receive earns our class a free book!  We got five new books from our September orders!!!  I'm hoping to purchase books on CD for our listening center with October's orders.  If you want to order online, our classroom code is MCPT8.

***I am listing all of our weekly sight words in the sidebar of this blog.  In addition to practicing the sight words given each week, it is extremely important that you are also reviewing all the sight words from prior weeks.

Congratulations, Taylor Nichols, our new Star Student.

Taylor is a great helper in the classroom - always willing to lend a helping hand.  She shows me that she wants to follow the rules and strives to make good choices throughout the day.  She sets a great example for her friends and has emerged as a leader in the class.  I am very pleased to honor Taylor this week!

Thanks again to Swaye's mom and Eden's mom for our large pumpkins!  We have a lot planned for our Pumpkin Unit this coming week! 

Fall is Here!

I could do without the 80 degree weather, but we are definitely seeing signs of fall around here.  I'll be happier when I go out to recess and not sweat! :)

Fall is our integrated theme this week and the kids brought their fair share of knowledge to the table.  It's important for students to dig deep and pull out that background knowledge they have stored away in order to make connections to what we are reading and learning.  Based on what we charted, I'd say we all have a pretty good understanding of fall.

The books we are reading this week include Fall Mixed Up by Bill Raczka and Leaf Jumpers by Carole Gerber.

We have focused on fall leaves - and more specifically, the colors of fall leaves.  We created tear art trees using our handprints and the colors of fall.  Tear art is great for fine motor skills and is always a kids' favorite.

We've also been focusing on the letter M and its sound.  The kids made hats to tie together handwriting, letter recognition and phonics for letter M.  They turned out so cute!

Thank you to Elizabeth's mom for donating our last set of headphones!  We now have all centers in our Daily Five functioning.  We've been practicing all week and things are looking promising for the start of small groups.  We already have our rotation chart up and ready to go!

Thanks to everyone who has been voting in our Limeades for Learning contest.  One of our class projects was funded this week!!!  We will soon have a new collection of Common Core aligned read alouds.  I am so excited!!!  Be sure to keep voting - the contest continues until the end of October.  There are several projects from our school that need your votes.  We still have our iPad Mini project that will need votes as well!

I'll be back to share other fall activities from this week - stay tuned.