Seed, sprout, pumpkin, pie

Pumpkin life cycle

So many seeds inside! 

My pumpkin friend!

 Pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie, and everything pumpkin in the food stores (pumpkin cheerios!) - time to learn about the little seeds behind the fall pumpkin craze. We enjoyed several texts depicting the life cycle of pumpkins, independently read about it on a non fiction Starfall book, sequenced pictures of the seed to pumpkin stages, learned how seeds can travel with the help of wind, animals, and birds, and even carved a pumpkin to examine the seeds inside.

All the stages of a pumpkin

Of course this experience provided an opportunity to integrate with writing. Everyone wrote the steps of carving a pumpkin as we were carving it, using transitional words of First, Next, Then, and Last. Finally, everyone had a chance to touch the goo and slippery seeds - fun!

Pumpkins on laptops!

Decorate a pumpkin

Slippery!

Yuck!

We like it!

Eww!

Do you dare

Wow, look!

We had a visit from Sergeant Manning this week as well. He shared some safety tips for costumes and visibility for anyone going out in the dark on Halloween.

Thanks for the tips!

After reading Jeb Scarecrow, we made little popsicle stick scarecrows as a follow up. They went along nicely with our scarecrow poem too. 

Singing the poem

Making the scarecrow

Lots of mini scarecrows

I like this little scarecrow!

It matches the poem

The math focus this week has been on adding in any order (commutative property), recognizing that counting on from the largest number is most efficient. They have been using dice and number cards to form an equation and then discussing with their partners the best  order to record it in their math notebooks.

Adding with the number line

Our math notebooks

Making equations to record

Let's record it this way...

Reviewing time to the hour

 Everyone has loved our rap song for learning doubles facts! We are practicing in advance, knowing that this will be introduced very soon!

Practicing facts to 10

Completing halves of a design

It's exciting to see the progress in phonics skills as the kids are becoming more proficient at making words by putting letters together. The sounding out and blending during pocket chart center has also been very effective. Working with partners in our PALS routine has been a fun way to practice sounds and words too.
                                                           

Taking turns in PALS

Nice job!

Decode and find the picture

Spider Cider words

 Reading aloud to peers is also a favorite and provides great practice as well.

Nice reading!

Great expression!

We read these!

We began Light Energy in science and played a fun guessing game to identify the sources of light, both natural and man-made.

You see this at night...

It can warm you up...

This use tis to see in the dark

This has a screen that glows

This week we wished a Happy Birthday to Sofia- have a wonderful birthday weekend! 

This coming Thursday, Scholastic sets up a Book Fair in the front hall. We will be visiting at 9:15. Your child can make a wish list for you to see and then choose a book another day, or choose a book on Thursday  to purchase right then, if you wish to participate.

 Enjoy the sunshine,
Mrs. Dagley

Only in Autumn

Collecting fall leaves

What a wonderful time to live in New England with all the beautiful leaf colors brightening up our scenery! The kids loved going outside to collect leaves for leaf rubbing. We read the non-fiction book Why Do Leaves Change Color? to better understand the process of leaves changing from green to red, yellow, or orange. The kids loved our windy recess days with the leaves swirling and flying around them! In writing, we added tissue paper colorful leaves to an opinion piece on favorite fall activities, and our class library is set up with fall books and nearby woodland animals.

Lots to learn about leaves

Favorite fall activities

Integrating opinion writing and autumn

Having fun with tissue leaves

Our read-aloud books this week focused on owls and bats- two flying creatures we could encounter in our woods. Little Owl's Night gave a glimpse of the world that is wide awake when we sleep, as owl met other nocturnal animals such as raccoons, opossums, skunks, and beavers. Good Night Owl was very funny as owl destroyed his house searching for a noise (a mouse), and it gave us opportunities to notice how features of text (bold words, large font) change the way we read the sentences. Little Bat was ready to try 'something' for the first time while encouraged by a forest of animals. Lots of predictions and some background knowledge were applied in discovering what little bat was going to do (fly). We followed this story up by making paper bats.

Who knew we had a resident scientist?!

Our fall themed library

Singing our poem about bats

Look at our bats!

Bats are ready to fly home

We wound up our math unit on 2D shapes, having learned about shape attributes (sides, corners, square corners, slanted sides, equal sides, and parallel sides.) The kids have divided shapes into halves and quarters and have been introduced to clocks as well which they folded into halves and quarters. They love using the little clocks when they make a time to the hour! Soon we will work on time to the half hour.

Showing 10 O'clock

The geo boards were popular for making and dividing shapes. Math stations gave kids a chance to practice symmetrical halves with a pattern block game, and identifying time with a clock game. They also practiced combinations of ten when they used fun spider manipulatives and paper webs. 

Look at my shape

Spiders with combinations of 10

Pattern block symmetry

Geo board fun!

Look how I divided mine

Practicing fall themed addition

Cutting and gluing shapes in math notebooks

Our 'Milestone' task

We concluded our shape unit with a Milestone task of choosing a shape to identify and write attributes for, and then drawing a non-example. 

A few snapshots of fun on the side include friends reading together, our computer language arts non fiction story about pumpkins, and some samples of our opinion writing:

Great reading!

Nice expression!

Everyone has an opinion!

It may have been a short week, but it was a busy one! We sang Happy Birthday to Evan this week who celebrated his birthday on Columbus Day weekend. This weekend is perfect for enjoying the colorful leaves - have fun outdoors!

Mrs. Dagley