Halloween Randomness

We have been busy getting in as many fun Halloween learning activities as possible. Here's a little bit of what we've been doing. Warning: lots of pictures ahead!

We learned the poem 5 Little Pumpkins and made this little craft to go along with it

We read some non-fiction stories about bats and listed some things we learned

We made these bats that have a clothespin between the body and wings so that we can pretend they are flying

We played a number line game in which the kids line their numbers up and take turns having their partners close their eyes while they take away a number. The partner has to guess which number is missing (you can get the cards here for free!)

We practiced sequencing with There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bat

Then, the kids did their own sequencing page

We also sequenced one of my favorite stories...The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything

The kids did their own sequencing again...you can find these activities here

We're working on the number 10...we practiced adding 1 more to our ten frame until we had 10



We practiced counting on from a given set to make 10 bats...Deeanna made this for us and will probably post to her blog about it.

This is a hard skill and I was ecstatic with how well my kids did with it!

This was another activity Deeanna made for us...we read the story 10 Trick or Treaters then acted it out while practicing taking 1 away

The kids loved being the creature/animal that scared a trick or treater away!

Today, we also read Green Witch, Green Witch, which is written like Brown Bear, Brown Bear with Halloween characters. I have no idea where this story originally came from as it was handed down to me by a veteran teacher my first year a long time ago! I redid it this year with some new clipart. You can click the picture if you would like a copy to use tomorrow (sorry it's so late!). I would love to hear if you use it! {Graphics are Scrappin Doodles and the cute cover font is from Erin at Creating and Teaching}

Tomorrow we'll be having our Halloween party, so I'm sure it will be an eventful day! Then, we'll be moving right into Thanksgiving. I'm trying to get in as much as I can before I have to be out on maternity leave and since Ellie Grace is due in a week, we are going to be busy in Mrs. Plant's Class

Pumpkin Wrap-Up and a Candy Corn Freebie

We finished up our pumpkin fun Friday by reading Spookley the Square Pumpkin. My kids loved the book and did a good job thinking of words to describe Spookley. After, we made our own Spookley pumpkins and wrote about them. We also watched the movie, which I picked up at Target, and it was really cute.

We also used our 9 Pumpkins song with our beads and fuzzy sticks to practice decomposing the number 9. This works so well for my kids since it is such a hands on way for them to visualize the different number combinations.

This week, we'll be squeezing in a little bit of bat fun as well as using my sequencing pack when we read The Little Old Lady Who Wasn't Afraid of Anything and There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bat. You can get the pack on sale here until midnight.

Graphics are KPM Doodles and fonts are from Hello Literacy

We'll also be doing lots of fun Halloween activities and partying on Wednesday. We are going to graph 3 different kinds of candy corn {regular, caramel, and green apple}. You can click on the picture below for your free copy of the graph.

Have a great week friends!

Trick or Treat Sale :)

{Thanks to Alisha for the cute graphic!}

 To celebrate Halloween {one of my favorite holidays}, I'm joining lots of other great bloggers and throwing a 20% off sale this weekend on everything in my TpT store.  You can click the picture above to shop and click here to see other great stores on sale. 

Happy weekend everyone!! I'll be busy frantically trying to get everything ready and finalized for baby cakes to make her appearance and trying to finish my Thanksgiving pack :).

More Pumpkin Fun

We have been super busy trying to get in all of our pumpkin fun this week...here are a few pictures of what we've been up to:

We finished our pumpkin life cycle craft {You can find the life cycle pieces here in Alisha's pack}

We used pumpkin counters that we glued together to make double sided to decompose the number 9

You can get this activity here

We used "pumpkins" and our pumpkin song to practice taking 1 away.

The kids are doing so well with math!! You can get this activity here.

We read the book, The Biggest Pumpkin Ever, and compared the two main characters

Then, we drew and wrote about what we would do with the biggest pumpkin...can I just tell you that I was jumping up and down with excitement over this writing...

And this!

We also read Too Many Pumpkins, which is one of my favorite Halloween books, but I forgot to take pictures of our beginning, middle, and end activity. Tomorrow is Friday friends...hope you have a great one!

Pumpkin Investigations!

Today we did lots of fun activities with our class pumpkin that we got at the pumpkin patch last week. The kids had a blast!

First, we estimated the circumference of our pumpkin. We started by letting one of the kids pull the yarn for her guess. Then, we put it around the pumpkin to see if it was too short or too long. It was a little too long, so we talked about making a good guess based off of what her string looked like.

Pulling yarn to make our estimate

Measuring to see if we were right

Tyrone guessed exactly right...the kids were so excited!

Clearly, this chart was made a LONG time ago (before I became obsessed with fonts), but it works well for comparing our yarn estimates.

The next thing we did was estimate the weight of our pumpkin. We had a little mini lesson on weight and talked about things that weighted more and less than each other before we made our guesses. We passed our pumpkin around so we could get a really good feel for it, then made our guess. After lunch, we took our pumpkin to the office to borrow our secretary's scale...our pumpkin weighed 3 pounds!

After estimating weight and circumference, we cut our pumpkin open and did some investigating. The kids thought it was so gross to feel the inside! Then, we wrote describing words for the outside and inside of our pumpkin.

The boys liked it more than the girls!

Thanks to Cara at The First Grade Parade for this idea...the green words describe the outside and the brown words describe the inside

This next picture is just to show how sweet my kiddos are. At the end of the day, I was spray painting beans to be our pumpkins later this week and two of my sweet girls offered to turn over all the beans to paint the other side so I wouldn't have to bend over (which is not easy to do with only 2 weeks until baby is here!).

Happy Tuesday!

Pumpkin Fun!

Today, we started learning about pumpkins and the kids are already super excited, especially since we went on a field trip to the pumpkin patch last week. We began by reading From Seed to Pumpkin and working together to write about how a pumpkin grows.

 We also painted plates to be our pumpkins that we will attach our pumpkin life cycle to tomorrow (thanks to The Bubbly Blonde!)

We always just use our fingers to paint...saves time and saves the hassle of washing the paintbrushes!

In math, we started working on the number 9. We are using the song, 5 Pumpkins Fat and Round, but I changed it to be 9 pumpkins so it would fit what we are doing this week. I have used this song since my first year of teaching and have no idea where it originally came from, so if you know, let me know :).

We worked on the promethean board to practice taking one away (when the farmer's son comes and picks one) and wrote our equations on white boards. We also practiced adding 1 more while putting 9 pumpkins on our ten frame.

I could not make this picture turn...grrr! The kids are getting so good at knowing whether we need to add or subtract!

Also, since I'm about to be on maternity leave any day, I'm trying really hard to get everything ready for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I made this game for my kiddos since we are really getting into reading CVC words (you can get it for free by clicking on the picture)

If you're still needing a few activities for Halloween, here are some things from my TpT store to check out:

Hope you all had a great Monday!!

Spider Math

This is going to be a quick post, but I wanted to share our math activity that we did today to help us practice decomposing the number 8. I gave each kiddo a cup with 8 double sided spiders (I copied spiders on blue and purple paper then glued the whole sheet together before cutting out). They shook the cup, then emptied the spiders. Then, on their recording sheet, they colored the amount of blue spiders they shook and the amount of purple spiders they shook. Finally, they filled in their equation. I was very nervous about this, but the majority of the kids did so well!! I do have a few who needed help with knowing what number to write (they could count the number of spiders, but are not connecting it to the numeral yet).

You can get the spider manipulatives (just pick 2 colors to copy on) and the recording sheet here (graphics are KPM Doodles). I would love to hear if you are able to use it in your class!
Have a great weekend!!