Pumpkins, Candy Corn, and Bats!

I don’t have a lot of pictures of our week of pumpkins and candy corn (check end of post for my excuse) but here are a few of the centers the kids did. At Candy Corn Word Building they had to try and use each of the short vowels in words to see what new words they could build. Example: if they had t_n they tried each vowel and recorded their new words: tan, ten, tin. At the Candy Corn Sentence Scramble they made sentences by unscrambling the candy corn and added punctuation marks and capital letters. Jolly Pumpkin Number Order they put number sets in order from least to greatest. At Jolly Pumpkin ABC Order they put 3 groups of 6 sight words in abc order. Pumpkin Vowel patch gave the kids the opportunity to make 5 short a, e, i, o, an u words using beginning and ending sounds on letter tiles.

At the Sweet Treats center they had to sort math facts on the candy corn with the trick or treater that had the correct sum. At Eating Candy Corn they solved subtraction facts. They also made cute Jolly Jacks using a 3x3 grid.

There were several other activities we worked on with pumpkins: Pumpkin Farmer, Pumpkin Farmer book showing life cycle of a pumpkin, Candy Corn Man art project, Candy Corn Fact Families flip chart, Silly Pumpkin stories, and much more…but I was not there to take the pics and blog about it…but I did leave very detailed plans and they followed through and made it without me for 7 days! I was VERY lucky to take a vacation with my husband to Hawaii!!! He had to go there for a work conference and so he took me a long with him. It was so relaxing (once I got 7 days of lesson plans done!) and beautiful there. Here is a look at the resort that I got to relax by the pool and read and not worry about anything because my sub was awesome and did a great job while I was away! We got back yesterday, but it already seems like a distant memory after being at work and catching up on all that I missed! It was good to see the kids. They greeted me with huge smiles, hugs, and cute welcome back cards today!

When I returned to the “real” world again today we finished up the bat theme and made these cute art projects. They wrote some great facts on what they learned about bats this week.

   

Aloha!

Fire Safety Week

The skills we worked on this week were making number sentences with the center Fire Dog Math. Students rolled 2 dice and added spots to the fire dog to match the number on the dice then wrote a number sentence to go with it. We had a center called Short Vowel Word Ladders. Students sorted pictures onto the fire ladders using the correct vowel sound and then sound spelled each of the words. At Fire Dog Counting they put fire hydrants, fire badges, and fire extinguishers in order counting by 2’s, 5’s, and 10’s.  The listening center was Clifford the Firehouse Dog. Students then made a Clifford puppet with the fire safety rule of stop, drop, and roll written on it. They had to solve a “3 Alarm Fire” by organizing 3 numbers in order from least to greatest. Our writing center was making complete sentences about fire safety rules.

We used lots of literature to learn more about being “Smoke Detectives” and our fire safety rules. We then made these cute firehouse dogs and wrote about what we will do to be fire safe!

Remember to change the batteries in your smoke detectors and make sure your family has a safe meeting place in case of a fire!

Welcome Octo-bear!

What a fun week we have had welcoming the new month of Octo-bear! Here is a look at what we did to welcome Octo-bear…

All of our centers were bear themed with skills that we were working on in our curriculum. We also used a lot of literature to incorporate creative writing activities.

Our WSU Pen Pals

We had some special visitors this week. The Wichita State Shocker Softball team has picked our class to be pen pals with this year. They are doing this for community service and we LOVED having them come to visit. They wrote each of the students letters to introduce themselves and even brought some treats for the kids. We got to have an extra play time when we went outside to get to know our new friends. We will write letters back and forth this year and when they come and visit again we will read to them.  We can’t wait to have them visit our classroom soon!

Fabulous Fall!

We had some beautiful fall days this past week. We are finally starting to have some crisp mornings. We enjoyed learning about the many different types of leaves, why leaves change color, and we talked about the different attributes of leaves. All of our centers were fall related. We sorted math facts and matched them up with the tree that showed the sums. We created short a, i, and short o words using letter tiles. They put fall words in ABC order then did a fall fill in making complete sentences. At one center they did leaf sorting and graphed the leaves then did some addition problems by joining sets of leaves. At listening center they listened to Clifford’s First Fall and then got to play a sight word game called “Leaf Blower”.

     

We also decorated our hallway with fall trees made from puzzle pieces and these “leaf men”.

Happy Fall!

Remembering Johnny Appleseed!

Monday, September 26 would have been Johnny Appleseed’s birthday. We got out the US map and followed his trail. We then used the sentence wheel to create super sentences about Johnny. Here are a few samples of our work.

We also made these torn apple trees to decorate our hallway with our art job of Johnny Appleseed that we did last week.