Munchkins & Pumpkins!
This week our theme was pumpkins! I was so bummed that it was only a four day week for the kids because there are SO many fun things we get to do with amazing children's literature about pumpkins and fun science activities.
We started off the week reading Spookley The Square Pumpkin and discussed how the illustrations match the words as well as the main idea and key details. During contect literacy, we broke out the watercolor paints to discuss how the paint starts as a solid then changes to a liquid when we add water (Changes In Matter) and then we painted our very own Spookleys!
The moral of the story is that it's okay to be different and that we're all special, so they created special pumpkins that were not necessarily orange or round!
On Wednesday, we read How Many Seeds In A Pumpkin? and predicted how many seeds we thought were in our big pumpkin! I recorded all of our predictions on chart paper and then the fun began...
We got MESSY! :) I was so proud of all of our kiddos because every single one of them jumped in and separated the seeds from the pulp and then counted how many seeds they had. We added them all up to find out that our pumpkin had 391 seeds...
and this guy was only 4 seeds less than our actual pumpkin! What a great estimate!
All of our centers and books were about pumpkins. We made pumpkin bubble maps to describe our pumpkins and used those adjectives to write our sentences. We also learned about the pumpkin lifecycle and discussed the states of matter of each part of the lifecycle.
It was such a fun week and we have a lot of our work displayed around our classroom!
Ask Your Child About:
-Writing: What are some adjectives that describe pumpkins? Can you write a sentence to tell your opinion about a pumpkin? Check your sentence with our writing checklist.
-Content Literacy: Matter! What state of matter is a pumpkin? What about a seed? What about watercolor paints?
-Phonics/Phonemic Awareness: Zz, Yy, Qq ... We know all 26 of our letters and their sounds now!
-Sight Words: It, at, and
-Reading: Why do the pictures need to match the words? What is the main topic of a book? What are details?
-Math: Positional words! What does it mean if something is above your head? What does it mean if something is below your knees?
I just wanted to say that I wish I had all of the time in the world to call home and tell you all how wonderful your children are and how lucky I am to spend my days with them! I try my hardest to have kids call home when they reach a learning goal or have an exceptionally great behavior day, and although we were able to make a couple this week, I wish we could do this more often! If you could only see your child's face on the other side of the phone when they get to tell you why they are calling home... it is precious! I will leave you with two recess pictures from this week that are too great not to share:
They started being a train on the playground without any direction whatsoever from me and it had me laughing so hard! They are such a fun group!
We have such great friends in our class; I couldn't be more proud of how compassionate they are with eachother!
Have a wonderful weekend!
With SO much love,
Ms. Ham
Disclosure: I have written consent to post pictures of students from parents/guardians.
