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

Rocktober & More

October 29, 2016
Is it just me or does this little ghosty crack you up? I adore him! 




We spent the month of October learning all about rocks! 


We spent the last few days of our unit exploring all about caves - from how caves form to the parts of a cave to cave formations to animals that live in caves.  We then wrapped up our rocktober fun by taking a field trip to the Inner Space Caverns.  If there is a cavern near you - I would definitely suggest taking a trip there.  The students LOVED it! And totally connected it with their learning - a few things I heard during the field trip...

"Are we in the twilight zone?"
"Oh, look! We are entering the mouth of the cave!"
"I hope we see some bats!"
"Oh cool! A stalagmite, a stalagmite, a column!" 

It was so fun to see their learning being connected to a real life experience!!

We did some fun cave activities (which of course I did not take pictures of...whomp, whomp...)

Here a some fun bat/cave activities we did
Top left: Text to Self Connection.  We read a bat book and on the back of that craftivity we included our text to self connection written response.
Top right: We began our unit on addition by creating a visual, a math sentence, and a word sentence to show the addition that was happening.
Bottom left: After learning all about bats, we wrote about what it would be like if we were a bat.  Then we drew 3 pictures of different things that we wrote about.
Bottom right: BME activity after reading Stellaluna.

We then spent the remaining few days of October learning about the history of Halloween, themes of Halloweens - including pumpkins, and completing some "spooky" Halloween projects!

You can get this spider here.



Andrea Sign

October Craftivities

October 23, 2016
October is such a fun month because of the unlimited amounts of festive craftivities that are possible! 


After reading Stellaluna, we talked about the beginning, middle, and end of the story.  We then made the cute visual above. 


During our study of S blends, we made these S blend spiders.  

Andrea Sign

Timelines

October 13, 2016
We have been spending this week talking all about timelines and chronological order.  

I've been searching for what feels like forever for a good timeline activity that my first graders could do and I have finally found the perfect one! 

After talking about past, present, & future and sequencing Columbus' voyage, we created our own timelines.


How cute are these?! Perfect for first graders!! 
Andrea Sign

Land Ho!

October 05, 2016
Today I spent time setting up for our Columbus Day fun on Friday.

Here is what we did last year...

Y'all, today was an ABSOLUTE BLAST!

Here is what led up to our fun for today...this week we have been learning about explores!

We began by learning all about explorers, creating an anchor chart, and writing about where we would like to explore as an explorer.

I found the cute templates for the boy and girl templates here and made the paper to fit the writing prompt.

We then learned all about Christopher Columbus.  The students were amazed that this happened over 500 years ago!  After reading the books, we made these great sequencing boats. 

Tip: After having the students cut out all of the sails, have the students find a spot in the room and lay out all the sails.  Then teach them how to sequence them (put one behind the other) and read each sail many times until they are able to sequence them.


Our morning work.


Finally, TODAY, we packed our bags, created a map/telescope, and put our hats on for a journey to a new land!  I found this idea from Jodi and isn't it the BEST?! My students absolutely LOVED IT!!!! They were so into it and many adults commented on how impressed they were with the deep understanding of facts that the students knew about the voyage! 

My goal was that the students understood the risks, sentiments, preparation, and trading that goes into exploring BUT the students were so into this Columbus Day voyage that they also were all about learning certain "Columbus trivia" facts - such as 1492, the 3 names of the ships, etc.


A couple of tips...
  • I did not have 7 volunteers so I took out a couple of the items to be traded for & kept the pumpkin (pumpkin muffins), cotton, feathers, popcorn, and cinnamon (cinnamon rice crispy treats.)
  • We didn't have another room available to go visit, so I had my natives sit on picnic blankets outside and when we arrived, I had the students sit in groups of 5.
  • Once everyone had traded in that group (and the group had talked about what the item was, how the item is used by the natives, what it feels like/tastes like/looks like/etc.) we would rotate to the next group.
  • We completed the voyage day book altogether and once we finished I gave them some time to color.
  • Before the voyage, I told the students that, like Columbus, we would be writing about our exploration and what we found and then sharing our exploration with our loved ones back home (they were supposed to read it with their families at home).


Happy Exploring & Happy Columbus Day (almost)! 
Andrea Sign