Happy Halloween!

October 31, 2017
  
Happy Halloween! 
How adorable is this sign that one of my homeroom parents made me a few years ago?! I absolutely LOVE putting it out each year!

  
Today was Crazy Hat Day at our school. I thought it would be so fun to make our own hats for the day! I googled "newspaper hats" on youtube & found so many great tutorials. My students were so creative! I loved all the hats that they made & how they showed their individual style as they created them. The parents seemed super happy too. Many said they were glad they didn't have to have finding a crazy hat on their plate with all of the other Halloween stuff going on.

This morning we had a class halloween breakfast. My homeroom parent came with so many great activities for the students to do! They are probably pinterest finds. 
  




 Monster Pencil Toppers
        
 
Roll A Monster 

These adorable Jack-O-Lantern decorations!


These ghost lanterns were so fun! The kids had such great ideas of what to do with them - some said they were going to put them in their jack-o-lanterns, some said they were going to use them as night lights in their room!

They also made a super cute spider & a web but I forgot to take a photo of it. :/
The rest of the day was filled with pumpkin fun! 

         

At the end of the day, it was time for me to take down my October classroom decor. I am "batty" for Octobers decor! 

Here's to a great Halloween!
Andrea Sign

Pumpkin Palooza!

October 31, 2017
It's a Pumpkin Party!


Today was filled with so much pumpkin fun!


We started out by reading all about pumpkins! 


 Then we spent time measuring how tall our pumpkin was, finding out it if would float or sink, measuring how wide it was, how many seeds were in it, and more! Unfortunately, we were so busy I forgot to take pictures! 


After reading, we talked about the pumpkin life cycle and created our own mini pumpkin life cycle booklet. 


We learned sequencing terms and did this pumpkin craftivitiy. 

Finally, we planted a pumpkin and are going to spend the next few weeks observing the life cycle of a pumpkin! We planted some seeds into a pumpkin and others into cups for each of the children. The pictures I took didn't turn out. I hope our pumpkins turn out as well as the one in the picture above!  

 We also made a pumpkin volcano which the students thought was so fun to watch! 
Andrea Sign

Around The World in One School Year!

October 30, 2017
During the year, I host an after school club. It is one of my favorite things that I do with my students. During this club we focus on one country each month. Last month, it was England. This month it is France.

This month we've been doing the same activities as last year. I've also added some new activities and twists on past ones.

I don't have any tissue paper readily available this year so we made these flags.
Next, I wanted to do something for the students to remember the lavender fields. So we made these cute lavender flowers.

                                        
We also went on a scavenger hunt around the school for Eiffel Towers, learned many different French words, and made our own nutella & banana crepes! 
Andrea Sign

How To Make Maze Bumper

October 30, 2017

1) Get a piece of card stock, folded it in 1/2 hotdog style. Cut on the folded line (so how they have 2 pieces). 


2) Take 1 of the pieces of paper. Folded it in half.  

3) Take the bottom (the side that wasn't on the folded edge) and folded the bottoms back about half way. (See picture above)

Repeat so it looks like this. 

4) Open the folds. There will be 3 folded lines. In between the 2 middle rectangles, put glue.  

5) Then fold the glued pieces together so they stick. Then the students unfolded the bottoms a little so that it was in a T shape. The kids all thought this was similar to making a plane. 

6) Cut the T flaps in half so that the T wasn't too wide.

Glue onto your maze!
Andrea Sign

How To Make A Kid Friendly Maze

October 30, 2017


Last week, my 1st graders made these Spooky Halloween Mazes as a connection to the book The Roll-Away Pumpkin. 

Here's how to make one of your own:

  1. Cover a box with construction paper. I used the box tops that go with the boxes that hold printer paper.
  2. Put some paint in each students box (whatever color they wanted). Then they each got 5 marbles. They put the marbles in the box top and rolled it around. This created a marble art background! This also painted the marbles - which I told the students were supposed to represent the pumpkin in the story.
  3. We spent about an hour making the bumpers.
  4. I gave each student a cauldron to place at the end of the maze. In the story, the pumpkin lands in a cauldron. 
  5. They placed their cauldron & bumpers where they thought they were like them. They had their finger pretend to be the marble and practiced running the maze to make sure the maze was how they wanted.
  6. They used stick glue to glue their bumpers down. 
  7. I hot glued their cauldron and also created a little ramp for the marbles to use to get into the cauldron. 
Andrea Sign

Making Reading Come Alive!

October 29, 2017
It's the Roll Away Pumpkin! 

After reading this book, I told the students that I noticed a pumpkin note sitting on my desk and I was thinking that maybe the Roll-Away pumpkin was rolling through our school! They were so excited to go hunt for the pumpkin! 





The hunt led us back to our classroom where I we found some fun science experiment materials!  

The students were so excited and loved using these materials to make a volcanic pumpkin! 

The next day, we re-read the story. I reminded the students about how great it is to re-read stories because each time we read it, we notice new things. This time, the students noticed that this story is similar to the gingerbread man story. 

After reading, we incorporated brought the story to life by using STEAM and creating pumpkin mazes.  

They had so much fun creating these mazes and were so proud with how they turned out! I could barely get them to stop playing the mazes as they walked out of school that day - they were obsessed!
Andrea Sign

Note To Self

October 09, 2017
How is it already October?? Now that the school year has gotten into the swing of things, time seems to just fly by.


One of my favorite things in the world is handwritten letters. I love the personal touch they add. From the time they took to write the letter, to getting to see their handwriting, to the stationary, the sweet words in the letter - there is so much I love about them! This year, I decided to write letters to each family in my class. I've always thought about doing this. It seems like our conferences, which are in October, don't happen until the school year has been going for a while and I really wanted a way to let the parents know how things are going before then. 

I wasn't sure if all the effort would be that worth it in the end. For me, it was nice to reflect on each child. For the parents, they LOVED this! I got so many nice notes from the parents about how much the letters meant to them. I will definitely be doing this every year from now on! 

Andrea Sign