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

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