Happy Halloween! Fall Festival!!

We had a "spook-tacular" day today! We began our day with a trick or a treat, wrote in our journals and then enjoyed a story as we played a listening bingo game.  We each got a special spider ring, sang a song and made spider hats.  To complete are day we had a"boo-rific" time with our 3rd grade buddies in Mrs. Donahoe's Class.  Here are some pictures from our day!

Our 3rd grade buddies

We painted pumpkins, read stories and ate our special snacks!  

We hope everyone had a terrific evening!  

I hope everyone had a fantastic weekend!  I wanted to thank you all for coming out to conferences on Thursday. It was great seeing everyone and chatting about your child, their successes and areas we will continue working on. I am amazed by the progress that has been made in such a short time!  Every child has grown in some way or another. I am very proud of them and look forward to the months ahead!

Here are a few pictures from Friday!  

Mixing primary colors.  The kids loved discovering the colors they were able to make.

Making real and nonsense words.  Eloise was very proud of reading these silly words.  

AJ made a real word and was very excited to figure it out!

It was amazing to see them sound out and blend the sounds!

Punching out letters.  This was a work out for our hands!  The children were excited to use the hole punches to find the different upper & lower case letters.  Each card focused on one letter.  

I caught Mary right when she was telling me the letter name! 

Everyone was excited to go to the listening center today!  

Read to Someone ~ Cameron is reading one of his books to Caelan.  

Sami & Sophia were using their witches fingers to help them point to words as they read.  I gave everyone a witches finger to keep in their browsing box to help them as they read.

More Daily Five Activities in action.

We had some fun with pattern blocks & math!  Everyone had a chance to build something with pattern blocks and then record how many of each shape they used.  They had a lot of fun creating and recording their work!

Jude made a shrink ray.

Owen made a castle.

Sophia made a design.

Caelan made a blowfish.  

I am not sure if you heard or not but Rita Rainbow came to visit our classroom yesterday to teach us about Primary Colors or "power colors".  She taught us how to make a rainbow using the three primary colors red, blue & yellow.  This week the children have had the chance to explore with the primary colors using a dropper, ice cube trays and colored water (red, yellow, blue).  Not only is this a great activity to learn about colors but it also helps to strengthen our finger muscles.  We also made some shape people and practiced our sight words.  

 Playing compare

 A favorite game for many!

 Number puzzle ~ finding 4 ways to show a number. 

 Working as a pair ~ rolling, writing & showing numbers. 

 Shape people ~ tracing, cutting, gluing & writing sight words.  

 This involves a lot of fine motor work to improve our finger muscles. 

 Number craft ~ numbers 5-10

 Mixing power colors ~ very serious stuff!  What color will I make?  

 All School Meeting ~ We reviewed cafeteria behavior and watched a fabulous video created by the PBIS committee.  We will continue to work on SOARing in the cafeteria!  

Pumpkin Exploration

We had a great day exploring pumpkins with Mrs. Bennett's Class.  We gathered together and watched a clip on the life cycle of a pumpkin, made some predictions and read a story.  We predicted how many seeds would be in a pumpkin, if the pumpkin would sink or float and guessed how much the pumpkin weighed.  We also sorted the seeds from the pulp "guts" of the pumpkin.  This kids had a great time and enjoyed a story to end our day using musical instruments throughout the book.
Here are some photos from our afternoon.

 Checking out if the pumpkin will sink or float.

 Touching the gooey pumpkin mess.  Some of us LOVED it and some of us thought it was GROSS!  

 EWWW!!

 Not too sure about this one.

 Enjoying some coloring, mazes & dot to dots.  

 One of my favorite October books The Little Old Lady Who Wasn't Afraid of Anything.

The kids used instruments to help with the sounds during the story.  We also built the scarecrow along the way.  

It was a terrific afternoon!