Stamina

Friday, October 24, 2014 No comments
We have been working on building our read to self  stamina since the first month of school!
When my kinders got to about 8 minutes I then introduced work on writing, then word work, and listening to reading. I don't think I want to do read to someone, so far now I am doing the "daily 4."

Today they finally did it, and read to self for 20 minutes!! I am so proud of them! 





This is my favorite party of the day now. I was really going back and forth whether it was worth all of this training, and now I really see that yes it is worth it! I can finally work individually with student or do small guided reading groups. I can't wait! I want to finish building their writing, word work, and listening stamina until the end of the month, which is one more week. Then I will finally introduce choice as well as begin to include CAFE strategies.


Pumpkins

Thursday, October 9, 2014 No comments
This week we learned all about on of my favorite things...pumpkins!



As soon as it hits October,
I always love to put up the orange lights 
and my Dia De Los Muertos banner!
It makes the classroom so festive and fun.

These were all of the pumpkin books that I read aloud for the week. 
There was one book that I had to get, which was: 
How many Seeds in a Pumpkin by Margaret McNamara
and I had ordered it from Scholastic and I was so happy that
it came JUST in time when we going to count our seeds!

We first talked about how pumpkins felt on the outside and the inside.

We read "Five Little Pumpkins" many times.
We then identified our "heart word" the in the poem.
I like to call the sight words, "heart words" because they have to memorize them by heart :)

We then began our pumpkin investigations! (My favorite thing to do!)
We measured how many unifix cubes tall our pumpkin was.

We then counted all of the lines on the pumpkin.

We then made a hypothesis if the pumpkin would sink or float...
a lot of them thought the pumpkin would sink.

We then opened up the pumpkin and took all of the seeds out.


We also measured how many pumpkins tall we were!
This was a big hit, with not only my kinders, 
but with all of the other students walking down the hallway.

The next day we counted all of the seeds.
This was a great assessment to see which students had trouble counting 
and one to one correspondence.
Our pumpkin had 524 seeds!

Here was my Pinterest inspired seed anchor chart.

The next day we cooked our seeds!
We have an oven in our staff lounge, 
so I took my students up there and 
we make cinnamon sugar covered pumpkin seeds. 

We then talked about the pumpkin life cycle.
I found a great YouTube video with a song of the pumpkin life cycle.

I really love doing interactive science notebook activities,
so I was very excited when I found a free pumpkin life cycle 
interactive notebook activity on Teachers Pay Teachers.

The last thing we will be doing is painting our own pumpkins!
Can't wait to start painting!


Plants

Thursday, October 2, 2014 No comments
It has been about a week since we have started growing our garden beans!

One activity that has always stuck with me from my teaching credential program was growing seeds in a plastic zip lock bag, so that is exactly what I did! 
I like putting the beans in a plastic zip lock bag, 
because you can really see the roots, stem, and leaves. 









I can't wait to move onto learning about pumpkins next!

Happy October!
The best month of the year! ;)