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