Turkey Trot Time

We spent a lot of time recently talking about ways we can show compassion in our classroom, our community, and at home.  The Food Drive and the Turkey Trot proved to be a great way to show our character education word of the month.  

We were eager to bring our items down for the Food Drive.

We had a blast dancing to the Turkey Trot song as part of our music and movement activities this past week.

Note: I'm hoping to show you a class picture of all of us in our Turkey Trot headbands.  My camera battery dies just as I was about to take it, so I used my video camera.  Now I need to teach myself how to take the photos off the camcorder and put them on here. :) 

Update on Pumpkin Riley

Here is Pumpkin Riley after being out in the garden for a few weeks:

Halloween Part 2

I apologize for the delay in posting.  I'm having issues with my laptop (again), and it takes forever to try to upload pictures and post them to the blog.  I'm secretly hoping this laptop will just quit altogether so I can justify getting a new one! :)  

Our Halloween celebration didn't end with the costume parade.  Students enjoyed some snacks and drinks while decorating their pumpkins in the afternoon.  Thank you to the parent helpers for providing all of the treats, pumpkins, and materials.  Lots of fun!

Doing the Skeleton Dance was a lot of fun during the month of October. :) 

Happy Halloween

Pumpkin Fun in Our Classroom

Learning about the Life Cycle of a pumpkin:

 Two great books to get us thinking about how pumpkins change throughout the seasons:

 We decided to create our very own Pumpkin Jack.

 We had a drawing to choose the name of our pumpkin.  Meet Pumpkin Riley! 

 We watched some great time lapse videos of pumpkins growing on our SMART board.

 Carving Pumpkin Riley:

Snippets and Snapshots

We have been studying informational texts to learn about ways people, animals and plants change throughout the seasons.

This month Gail Gibbons is part of our author study.

We worked in cooperative groups to create a tree for our seasonal mural.

We enjoyed working as a team to paint the trunks for our trees.

Next, we decided how we would decorate our tree to show the changes of the tree throughout the seasons.

What's in our book bin?  We begin the year with adding our poetry notebooks, sight word books, alphabet books, and list and label books.  

Welcome to Our Classroom

Today we welcomed a new friend to our room.  He had a terrific day, and we all think he will be very happy in our classroom this year.  Be sure to ask your child about him.