Monsters, Spiders, and Ghosts, OH MY!

 We learned SO many new concepts in reading this week.  We learned about verbs, summarizing, story structure, and words with the short /u/ sound.  Those are all some hard concepts to understand, but they did a great job!  We will be reviewing everything we have learned in first grade next week, and moving on to harder stuff the following week.  

In math we are still working on adding doubles together.  We have also started to add 1 to a number, and will continue learning about that math concept next week.  We also did some fun math centers for Halloween!  We did spider graphs on spider day, and spooky doubles on ghost day!

This week to help us get ready for Halloween, we learned about monsters, ghosts, spiders, witches and bats.

Monday we learned about BATS.  I had fun learning about bats and the different kinds.  Bats are so unusual and neat to learn about.

We did an art project  and I love how they turned out!  I like doing art so much with these kids because they all turn out SO different from one another.  You can really tell their personalities from their art.

On Tuesday we did worksheets on monsters and read books about monsters.  

It was just a monster day!

For this activity, the students had to listen to my directions and follow them. 

 I love how different they turned out.

The directions are:

1. Give your monster three purple eyes.

2. Add a strange green nose.

3. Put on big, pointed yellow ears.

4. Add a mouth with sharp red teeth.

5. Put on crazy orange hair.

6. Now give it pink spots all over.

7. Give your monster 3 blue feet.

8. Add 4 black arms.

Wednesday we made ghosts.  It is really simple to make.

Just get a wire hanger, white tights, black paint, and you can make your ghosts!

They can bend them however they want to and make it their own.

I think they turned out pretty cute!

During ghost centers, we practiced our doubles!  I gave every pair of student a die, and they had to roll it.  After they rolled it, they had to double that number.  After figuring out the answer, they would put their marker on that number on the game board, then the student with the most pieces on the board won. 

When we learned about spiders, I had a hard time reading the book I had about spiders.

I hate spiders.  A lot.  

They are gross and the pictures made the spiders look huge and SO real.

GROSS.  

I told the kids if they didn't want to look at the pictures they didn't have to, 

because I wasn't even going to look at the pictures.  

And I kept reminding them that the pictures in the book aren't real.  

I had to keep telling myself the same thing...

But our spider project that we did was pretty fun.

Just get a black plate, cut around the edges, wrap grey yarn around it and put a spider ring in the middle.

For our spider centers, we also worked on counting/sorting/graphing. I gave each pair of children a bag of spider rings.  They had to sort the spider rings by color, then count them.  After they counted them, they had to graph them by color.  Easy and fun!

Friday was witch day.  We made standing witches, and read stories about witches.  I wish we had time on Friday to do more crafts, but Friday's are SO busy!

This Monday we will learn about pumpkins, Tuesday we will learn about skeletons, and Wednesday is Halloween and it is going to be a fun day!  Remember that the costume parade is from 10:00-10:30 and you are welcome to come and watch!  Our Halloween party will be later that day from 12:00-1:20.  Also remember that Halloween is early release!

We will still be doing reading and math on Halloween, but all of the reading and math that we do will be about Halloween (if you can't beat em', join em').  

I'm looking forward to this week.  Thank you parents for all that you do!  I am one lucky teacher!

I apologize for it taking me so long lately to put posts up about our weeks at school.  The past few months have been CRAZY, but I promise I will be better at it.  :)  I also want to apologize for my lack of pictures this week.  I tore a muscle in my shoulder this week and completely forgot to take lots of pictures of what we were doing.  But I did take a couple!  So, here is what we worked on this week.

This week we learned about Nouns.  We read a book to help us learn about nouns and we practiced identifying the different nouns with this chart I made on the white board.

 Next week will be the last week of short vowels, and we are going to start getting into the harder first grade concepts.  I think we are all ready for it!  

In math we are starting to learn about different facts.  This week we learned about our doubles facts, and we learned a doubles rap to go along with it.  I love learning to songs/raps because I feel like they remember the concepts better when they are put to music.  It is something they can remember easier.

From now until Halloween (in 10 days!) we are doing to do a "theme" every day to get into the Halloween spirit.  On Friday, we learned about scarecrows and did some fun art to go along with that theme.  Next week we are going to be learning about bats, monsters, spiders, witches, and ghosts.  We will do a fun art/craft to go with each theme and we will read books that go along with each theme.

Next week for our ghost craft, we are going to be using wire hangers.  Parents, if any of you have an extra wire hanger you could donate to the classroom, that would be much appreciated!  You are wonderful parents and I am such a lucky teacher to have your child in my classroom.  Thank you for all that you do!

This week was mostly a review week.  On Monday we celebrated Columbus Day, had review days with the short vowels, and then Friday was Pirate Day.  We were a week ahead in reading, so I decided to have a review so we could be on the same page as the other teachers.  I love being a teacher because I also learning things every day!  When we were learning about Christopher Columbus, I learned some things that I either forgot about or never knew.  And today, some of the kiddos taught me some things about pirates that I didn't even know.  :)  It was pretty cute.  We all had a fun week.

This week FLEW by!  On Wednesday, I thought it was Tuesday.  Then before I knew it I had to prepare for pirate day.  Where did the time go?!  We were just having too much fun learning at school.

On Columbus Day, we read some stories about Christopher Columbus, made some books to help us get to know him better, and we watched a short movie to understand why he is so important.

And then Friday, it was Pirate Day!  The class earned a special "party" because they got 25 bees, which is basically the same thing as the tally mark system.  Once they are SO good that I put up 25 bees, then they get a special party.  But I can always take bees down if they aren't being good.  I was so proud of them for earning the 25 bees!

We started out the day by reading some wonderful pirate books.  If you haven't figured it out yet, I LOVE children's books.  I could sit there and read children's books all day.  It is definitely my weakness when it comes to buying things for my classroom.  :)

After we read some books, it was time for them to name their ships!  They all had to agree on a name for their ship and work together to come up with the name.  They all came up with some great ones!  When I was taking their pictures, I told them to make pirate faces.  I love the faces I got.

We've got some cool pirates in our classroom!  They did a great job naming them and I was so proud at how well they did!  After they named their ships, we got to make our very own pirate book!  I gave every 2 kids a big piece of paper with a sentence on it and they had to work together to draw the picture to go with the story.

Their drawings turned out great and we put the but together and read the story together.  The kids LOVED this part and loved trying to figure out who drew what.  It was pretty fun.  :)

We did a lot of learning the pirate way!  Here are just a few more things that we did during pirate day:
We read a story about pirates, and then we made our very own pirate scene.

We also did a few worksheets to help us learn.  Here are just a couple of worksheets that we did:

The second worksheet could be made into a short vowel game.  Many of them didn't finish it, but they took it home.  If you see this in their folder, practice their vowels with them by playing this game!  You could use a candy land board or any other game board, spin a spinner or roll a die, and you have to draw one of the pictures.  If you put it in the right spot, you get to move you piece how ever many spaces you spun/rolled.  It could be a fun learning game, so make sure you look for this in their folder!

We also went on a fun treasure hunt!  We had to follow the clues to lead us back to where the treasure was.  The clues led us back to our classroom where they had to search for the hidden treasure (it really wasn't that hidden, but it took them a few minutes to realize where it was).  And this is what they found:

I used our treasure as a math activity.  Since we obviously had more than 16 (that's how many we had in class that day) we had to figure out how to give everyone an equal amount.  They figured out that we had to start with giving each person one piece of gold.  We kept doing this until there was obviously not enough for everyone to have another one.  This was a great sorting lesson.  I love having fun while learning, and getting a delicious prize at the end!

Next week we get to start our Halloween crafts and learning centers.  I LOVE celebrating holiday's with the students.  It makes the Holiday's much more exciting (for someone like me...who doesn't have any kids of my own).  This year, we are doing a "you've been booed" to each classroom in the school.  Thank you SO much to a parent in the classroom that came up with the awesome idea!  I remember doing this when I was in elementary school, but never even thought about doing it at school.  It is going to be a lot of fun and I am really looking forward to it.  What you do is copy this poem and cute ghost on a piece of paper, and put it in a bag/basket/bucket full of candy/crafts/other fun things, and sneakily put it outside of a classroom.  Then you have to put the picture of the ghost on the outside of the door so you don't get "booed" again.  Such a cute idea!

 Here are the awesome baskets that the parent made for this fun idea.  They also have some candy in them too.  So cute!!!  Thank you so much for coming up with this idea!

I am really looking forward to all of the fun Halloween Activities that I have planned.  I hope the kids will like it just as much, if not more!  :)

Thanks so much parents for everything you do and letting me borrow you children for 6 1/2 hours M-F.  I am lucky to have the class I have and I wake up every day excited to come to school to see all of their smiling faces.  I couldn't have asked for better parents or students this year.  Thank you!

It was a short week, but we still learned SO much!  We are moving forward with our vowels and this week, we practiced writing, reading, and saying words that included the vowel short /i/.  We worked really hard this week and learned SO much!  As somewhat of a challenging center this week, we made "fall" leaves.  They had to write words that ended in "all" on the leaves then glue them on the tree branches.  They did a great job!

We also did our October Calender.  I love how each of them turned out so differently.

Pretty much everyone wanted me to take their picture...so I did.

We learned a lot this week, including making an addition sentence.  Next week we are going to be learning about Christopher Columbus, and we will keep learning about the short /i/ for one more week.

Thank you parents for all that you do!