Halloween

It is getting very close to Halloween and we are getting very excited thinking about all of the fun we will have.  We have been working very hard during our first 50 days of kindergarten and now it is time to have a little holiday fun!  We have made some really cute things this year to get ready for Halloween. We have tried to contain our excitement and take Halloween a piece at a time.  Here is a snapshot of what we have been doing...

Five Little Pumpkins

This is always one of my favorite Halloween stories- it is cute and predictable so the kids love it.  We worked together in committees to retell each page of the story.  I was very impressed with how well they were able to plan and work together.

Pumpkin Estimation

We estimated how tall we thought our pumpkin would be and how big around.  We had a few people who guessed correctly!

Mummies

We read the book, I Want My Mummy and made text to self connections after we read the book.  We also made our own mummies and had a delicious mummy snack.

Boo Who Are You?

We made trick-or-treaters to get us in the Halloween spirit.  The kids had fun guessing who everyone was.



Shape Monsters

 We read the book I Need My Monster (so funny) by Amanda Noll and made our own monster glyphs.  They turned out even cuter than I imagined.

Go Away Big Green Monster!

We read Ed Emberly's book Go Away Big Green Monster! and made our own monsters to go along with it.  We also worked on our color words to fill out our monster key.

Jack-o-lantern Bar Graphs

We graphed the ways that we would carve our pumpkins and talked about the results.  It turns out that most of the students in my class would carve thier pumpkin with triangle eyes and a triangle nose with a regular smile (no teeth).

Candy Corn

Each child traced the pieces of the candy corn, cut them out  and glued it together.  They are so simple, but they look so cute hanging in our room.

Bats

We have learned all about bats.  We read Stellaluna and discussed what we knew about bats.  made a   They each wrote one fact that they learned about bats and soda can bat to hang in our "bat cave" in the hall. It think they turned out pretty cute :)

Pumpkin Sequencing

We read the book Pumpkin Pumpkin by Jeanne Titherington which tells about the life cycle of a pumpkin.  Next, we made our own pumpkin life cycles.  We folded our paper to make our pumpkins into pockets for our sequencing cards.  Here is the link for the great little cards.

Fall is in the air (well, almost)

The weather may not feel like fall in Alabama, but I am definitely ready to bring the fall activities in my classroom!  We got started today by reading one of my favorite books about owls by Gail Gibbons simply called Owls.  We followed it up by making an owl gyph (yay-another one) by Shari Sloane.  If you have not checked out her website yet- you need to!  Here is the link for the big glyph key and the student glyph key as well (why recreate the wheel). I think they turned out pretty cute!

Maps

We have just finished our study of maps.  To begin our study, we made a KWL chart to figure out what we already knew about maps and what we wanted to learn. 

 We have read lots of great books to help us learn all about maps.  We have also practiced making maps of our Kindergarten hall, our school and our bedrooms.

                
We also made a great map based on the book Me on the Map by Joan Sweeney.  We mapped ourselves from our house all the way to our planet Earth. 



Nutrition

We just finished a two week study of nutrition.  We talked about all of the food groups and making healthy choices.  We also made some really cute crafts during our study of nutrition.  As you will see, we had a blast learning about nutrition.

 It Looked Like Spilt Milk- they really used their imaginations and came up with some great ideas.

Pizza Glyph- another glyph from Shari Sloan used to represent information about ourselves.  We also read Pizza Pat  by Rita Golden Gelman and learned how to make our very own, delicious pizzas for special snack.  (English muffins, pizza sauce, mozzarella cheese and pepperonis)



Apple Day- We spent a whole day doing apple activities.  One of our favorites was the apple graph!  We all lined up by our apple colors and took a picture holding up our apples.  We analyzed our information and found that most people in our class like mixed apples.

Hot Dog Graphing- We read The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog! by Mo Willems and graphed how we like to eat our hot dogs.  We found that most people like them with ketchup.  Mo Willems' website a a great game to go along with this book.  Click here to play!

We also learned a song to put in a pocket chart- Five Little Hot Dogs
Five little hot dogs frying in a pan.
The grease got hot and one went BAM!
Four little hot dogs frying in a pan (and so on....)

Grain Day- We read On Top of Spaghetti by Tom Glazer and made Spaghetti Man- he eats the pasta right off the plate!

Tops and Bottoms Flipbook- activity done following Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens

Shopping for Healthy Choices From Each Food Group

Healthy vs. Not Healthy- students looked through magazines to find all of their pictures