We have continued to learn about poems and today we listened to the poem 5 Little Pumpkins Sitting on a Gate on the SMART board. We listened to the song and learned ordinal numbers by following along with the song / poem.
Then to practice what we’ve learned about ordinal numbers, we played an ordinal numbers matching game. Students stood up in front of the room while other students sat down and called out two different ordinal numbers, “I’ll pick the 2nd student and the 5th student”. If they made a match with the Halloween picture they scored a point.
This last week I introduced the class to poetry and read to them the special halloween poem called “The Halloween Surprise”. We practice looking for rhyming words and recognizing special sight words from the poem.
Then students used words and ideas from the Halloween Surprise to create their own Halloween stories and writing. They also created a construction paper jack-o-lantern to go along with their writing.
This afternoon for a read aloud we read the story Joey the Jack-O’-Lantern. We discussed the problem and solution of the story. Since the story is an easy reader and has lots of repetitive text, students were given the opportunity to retell the story during center time. Students then illustrated the problem and solution of the story by making their own construction paper jack-o’-lanterns.
As Halloween is just around the corner we have started several Halloween math centers with topics that we’ve been learning throughout the past few weeks. We’ve worked on number recognition with an “I See” Halloween Book. Students counted the Halloween pictures wrote the number and copied the sentence. They loved making these books because these words were easily recognizable to them!
We listened to the poem 5 Little Pumpkins Sitting on a Gate and then students make their own pumpkins sitting on a gate with play-doh and matching number cards.
At the beginning of the year we learned about making patterns and as a refresher and spiral review, students made and completed Halloween shape patterns.
Yesterday we learned about ten-frames and how to count and add to ten using candy corn as our counters. Students were able to manipulate the candy corn on the smart board to get other classmates to guess the number.
Today we worked on decomposing the number four. We used green triangle pattern blocks to be used as jack-o-lantern teeth. We put those teeth in different positions on the pumpkin and created addition sentences. Students learned that no matter how often the position of the teeth changed, the whole group always remained 4.
On Friday we read the story The Costume Party by Victoria Chess. To continue on our study about character’s we discussed the different character’s of the story and what costumes they picked to wear to the costume party.
We then made a connection to the story and talked about how we will have a costume party in our class on Halloween Day. We created a class graph as a class discussing what kind of costume we will wear to our Halloween Costume party. We also talked about which category has the most students in it.
We read the story There’s a Billy Goat in the Garden in big book form. We made 3 popsicle stick puppets from characters in the story and retold the story with the puppets.
We also have continued our study on characters in books that we read, and students wrote about their favorite character, and we discussed why they were our favorite characters.
We read the story An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly and retold the story by shoving animals into an old lady puppet’s mouth. Then we discussed characters of the story and talked about what a main character is. We drew illustrations or wrote the main character as well as three other characters in inside the story to make a character map.
We have continued our theme on farms and animals on the farm. The students that we can get more than just food from farms but we can also get wool from sheep to make clothes. Then for read aloud time we read story Woolbur. We created a Venn Diagram comparing the story to a previous story we read during our National Geographic Cengage Reading block time.
We wrote about what makes us special and unique and made an art project to make us colorful like Woolbur and his friends. Students really enjoyed showing of their own unique creativity!
Moving on from the fall harvest unit we talked about where food comes from. Students learned that food doesn’t just come from the store but much of our food that we eat comes from farms. We watched Sesame Street visit to a farm (since there are no farms out here in rural Alaska).
We then discussed the main idea of the movie (there are many foods that can come from farms), and illustrated the key details we saw in the video in a web graphic organizer.
Today we read the story Click Clack Moo: Cow’s That Type discussed cause and effect. We then created an emergent reader book talking about what other animals on the farm might want.
We read the book Pumpkin, Pumpkin and discussed how the pumpkin didn’t start out as a pumpkin but as a seed. We retold the story by making a model of the life cycle of the pumpkin.
