Pumpkins!

Pumpkins have arrived in the classroom! Friday after school, my dad helped me pick out some pumpkins from the patch he planted at my grandmas house. These two beauties are already at school and ready for a fun activity! Two more will be coming towards the end of the month to carve in class. Keep watching the blog for pictures of these pumpkins and other fun pumpkin activities.

Journals

On Wednesdays and Thursdays, each class has been completing a page in their journals for morning work. This is something new I started using this year to get extra practice with academic skills we are learning about that week. So far we have been tracing and coloring the shape of the week. During this activity, The students are practicing writing skills,  find motor skills, tracing skills, hand/eye coordination, and working towards being able to independently draw the shapes. As the year goes on we will continue to use the journals to practice name writing and tracing, number writing and tracing, and letter writing and tracing.

C is for cookie.... and Cheerios!

This week for C, we baked sugar cookies and the students used tongue depressors to put icing on them and ate the cookies for snacktime. We also counted Cheerios,  which the students were able to eat after the activity,  and I sent the activity home with more Cheerios so each student could do this at home with their parents. We also had picture day on Wednesday and Thursday. For our letter C project, we glued cotton balls to the letter C. The students not only fed Letter Muncher, but also Cookie Monster chocolate chip cookies!  Two students rolled a large dice,  we added the numbers each student rolled and created a number sentence.  Example 5+2=7. Each student then picked up and counted the number of cookies they rolled and fed them to Cookie Monster. Thanks to Kohls and the Kohls cares for kids program,  I was able to purchase the Cookie Monster plush for this activity for only five dollars.

Here are some pictures!

Potato Heads

A big thank you to my assistant Mrs. Carr for bringing several Mr. Potato Heads to school for the kids.  They love them! The students are using their  imaginations , creativity, fine motor skills and problem solving skills.

Letter Muncher 2.0

I got a new Letter Muncher this year! He is a zipper pencil box from Wal-Mart. The kids love him! Each week, he eats pictures of objects that start with the letter we are studying for the week. Each student feeds him the picture and he gobbles it up! If he eats a picture that starts with a different letter, he spits it out! This week he is eating the letter C.

All About Me project

At the beginning of the school year,  we started an all about me project. Each student received a poster in their folders and took the project home to complete with their parents. The students and parents had to count the letters in the child's name, find which letters of the alphabet are in the child's name, count the letters, and figure out what letters their name started and ended with to fill out the poster. They also answered some fun questions, One being what is a special fact about your name. It was so much fun reading about how each child was given their name by their parents. The reasons varied from being named after family members to family traditions, favorite songs and hobbies. A big thank you to the parents for sharing these fun facts with us and working with your child to create this wonderful keepsake. Here are a few pictures of the posters!

B is for Blue Bird

Here are the finished sponge painted bluebirds! We added a Googly eye and a feather for a wing.

Blue Birds

They are not finished yet,  but here are our sponge painted birds.

B is for Bubble Wrap

This week we are talking about the letter B. We fed letter muncher pictures that start with a B and painted a B using blue paint and bubblewrap.  Both classes had a blast painting in a different way.  They also sponge painted bluebirds. Today and tomorrow we are playing with balloons in the gym during gross motor time. We also read the Usborne book, "Little bear needs glasses." This is an interactive board book that includes reusable sticker glasses.  Little bear has trouble seeing and his friends try to help them and let them borrow their glasses, but they are not the right fit.  Little Bear soon find glasses that fit just right. Also today and tomorrow, we are learning about germs from the water and soil conservation department. We learned why we should always wash your hands and how hard it is to get rid of the germs on our hands when we do wash. We use the special hand lotion that had "germs" in it and one three rub the lotion onto our hands we held them under a black light to see the germs on her hands. We then washed and dried our hands to get the germs off and put them back under the black light to see if we got all the germs off our hands. Some were very hard to get rid of! We will have presentations from the water and soil conservation department every month during the school year.

Here are some pictures of our bubblewrap paintings!

Apples

Here are the apples we painted this week. We dipped the ends of cardboard tubes into red paint and stamped the apple with circles. 

A is for Apple

It's been a crazy and fun almost 4 weeks into the school year! We've had Fog Days and the county fair, with more events to come. For the last couple weeks, we started an author study about Mo Willems and have read several of his books including books from The Pigeon series and our class favorite, anything in The Elephant and Piggie series. While we read about elephant and piggy, the students wanted to know more about about real elephants.  We read a nonfiction book about elephants and learned many facts about elephants, one being why elephants flap their ears. For our fair project, the two day class made paper plate piggies and the three day class made a paper plate elephants to go with our Moe Willems theme. This week we started our academic themes. We are learning about the letter A, Number zero, shape circle, and the color red. Here's what we did this week!

- painted an apple red

- sing-a-Song about circles

- completed finger plays about apples

- danced to the chicken dance, The dinosaur march, and sang our days of the week and months of the year songs during circle time

- we read "Secrets of the Apple tree" shine a light book from Usborne Books

- we practiced writing the A

- we fed Letter Muncher pictures that start with the A

- during gross motor time we picked apples and ran them back to Miss Rachel's basket

Next week we are learning about the letter B. Check back next week to see what we are up to in the classroom!