Pumpkins

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!

Checking Back In!

Hello everyone!

Wow, I just realized that I have not posted anything 

since August after I got my combination classroom assignment!

This "blended" classroom of 10 kindergartners and 15 first graders (and a few rowdy first grade boys doesn't help!) is really keeping me busy! The first week of school was very challenging...on the second day of school, during recess I shut the door, sat at my desk, buried my head in a pillow and just cried. 

It has been 3 months and I have been getting the hang of it, however it is still not easy. 

God always gives us things that we can handle and I am trying my best!

Everyday is a new day and a new learning experience.

Here are some things that I have done with my kiddos since school has started:

I made a 1st Day of School Frame

In September I made applesauce for the first time & it was a success!

I decided to make some crayon art and it turned out amazing!

We had a great time with our pumpkin investigations in October!

In November we made turkeys in disguise and they turned out really cute!

In December we had a lot of fun with our classroom elf Jack, but poor thing got sick a couple of times because some friends didn't follow the rules and touched him! 

To end the year I did a whole gingerbread unit where we read many gingerbread stories and compared/contrasted them, made a paper gingerbread, had a gingerbread science experiment, and ended it with making gingerbread houses on the last day before winter break. 

What a year 2013 has been! 

Looking forward to 2014!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from my family to yours!