The Great Pumpkin Investigation

Wow...what a busy week we had!  I first want to start off by saying thank you to all  of my parents that made it to parent teacher conferences.  Thank you for being flexible with your schedules and coming in to discuss your child's progress this year.  I enjoyed meeting with you.  As always if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email or call me.  I also want to send out another big thank you to everyone that ordered from Scholastics again this month.  Your orders truly enable me to get lots of books that are free for our classroom.  Every month I use the bonus points earned to obtain new books that my students are interested in.

Thank you for your book orders.

This week was our annual Pumpkin Investigations!  I love this time of the year and all of the hands on learning the kids get to be involved in.  We teamed up with  pre-k to do our pumpkin investigations this year.  Our firsties partnered up with a prek student to help them go through our investigation stations.  This year the students investigated the pumpkins weight and height.  In addition, they completed a force and motion and sink or float experiment.  The students first made a prediction at each station and then they completed the task to confirm or reject their predictions.  They had so much fun and learned a lot!!

Next, we cut open our large pumpkin to investigate what the inside of a pumpkin looked like.  We also predicted how many seeds would be in the pumpkin and then counted the seeds inside the pumpkin to check our prediction.  We were surprise at how many seeds were in the pumpkin.  We counted 232.  First we grouped the pumpkin seeds by groups of 10 and then we counted the leftovers.  The kids were also surprised at how slimy the inside of a pumpkin can be!!

Once again...thank you to everyone who donated pumpkins for our investigations, volunteered to come to the party, brought in snack and drink items for the party, and planned the fall fun for our party.  The kids really enjoyed themselves.  I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and enjoy the spirited fun of Halloween!

Field Trip Fun

I want to begin this post by saying thank you to those parents that joined us on the field trip.  I hope you all enjoyed your time with our class.  Trips like these could not be possible without our parent helpers.  We had a great time at The Peach Tree Farm on Wednesday.  Here are a few of the pictures I have edited from our trip.  I will try to post more as the months continue.

A couple of reminders.  This week is parent teacher conferences.  I will be sending home reminder times on Monday in your child's blue homework folder.  Please arrive on time.  Also, please keep in mind that each conference is 15 minutes.  Below are some of the important dates for you to remember for the coming weeks.

Grades will be handed out during parent teacher conferences.

10/27-PT conferences

10/28—Pumpkin Investigations.  We are still in need of pumpkins.  

10/29-PT conferences

10/30 No School

11/2—11/6 Book Fair in the Elementary Library

11/4– Our class will visit the book fair on this day.  Flyers will go home next week.

11/9—NO SCHOOL Staff PD day.

11/13—Major Savor Assembly

11/24—Midterms go home.

What's Happening...

This Friday was the mini-cheer act at the home football game.  The girls had so much fun and really did a fabulous job.  Great job goes out to my own little one and these three sweethearts pictured below.  Way to go girls and GO PINTOS!

 It's starting to resemble fall not only outside, but in the classroom as well.  I finally got our fall bulletin board up and the kids just absolutely love it!  We'll be doing an activity to go along with this theme in the coming weeks.  For now....enjoy the fall season with this pic!

 With all the ROYALS excitement I had to share this sweet pic of my girl and I during one of the recesses this week.  We are avid Royals fans and are so excited to see our boys in blue playing so well.

 Our centers are even reflecting the season as well.  Our new math game is called Counting Spiders.  The students are practicing their math facts by looking at the number sentence, using the halloween counters to help them figure out the problem and then they place the number sentence on the answer mat.

The kids have also been using their addition flash cards to practice their math facts.  We have been practicing the doubles problems and become very fluent with our facts.  I am amazed at how quickly the students have learned their doubles.

 

Of course we still love to use the computers to help with our math fluency as well.

Our new word work activity this week has the students using magnetic letters to spell our word wall words.  This coming week, the students will be taking a spelling test that will help me create individualized spelling lists for each child.  You will hear more about this spelling program called Making Meaning next week.

Here are some reminders about this upcoming week.  I hope you all have a great weekend!!

Your child's parent teacher conference scheduled time is in your child's homework folder. I tried my best to give you a time that you requested.  If you did not turn in your parent teacher conference form, I assigned you a time that I had available.  If the time and date given will not work for you, please let me know so we can meet at a time that works best for you.

On Wednesday, October 28th our class will be conducting a pumpkin investigation as a culmination to our living/nonliving unit.  We need various sizes of pumpkins donated for the pumpkin investigation.  If you would be willing to donate a pumpkin to our class, please bring it in by next Friday.  Thank you so much for all your help in making this project a success for the students.

Our class fall party will be on October 29th from 2—3pm.  If you would like to donate a food, drink, or volunteer for the games, please fill out the yellow fall party note that went home in your child’s blue homework folder.

Quick updates

I apologize for the late post this week.  Thank you to everyone who has been understanding.  My husband's procedure went great and he is on his way to healing very nicely.  I would like to remind you that all field trip permission forms and money was due on Friday.  There are a few that I have not received yet.  I will send home new forms tomorrow.  I must have all forms no later than Wednesday.  If you are having difficulty paying for this trip, please let me know as soon as possible so that we can work out a way for your child to attend this trip.

Also, just another quick reminder on Friday I had the substitute send home the parent/teacher conference sign up forms.  Please try and get these to me as soon as possible.  I will do my best to work with you on creating a time that works best for your family.

Celebrating American Symbols

This week we finally finished our unit on American symbols.  We began learning about American symbols around Citizenship Day which is the 17th of September.  We started the unit out by reading We the Kids by David Catrow and listening to the Preamble of the Constitution on School House Rocks.  Afterwards, we learned about the American flag and the meaning of each color and what the flag represents.  The students also learned why we say The Pledge of Allegiance every morning.  In addition, they learned what the pledge means.  Afterwards, we spent a little time on each of the American symbols, reading articles about them in shared reading.  We just had to finish this unit off with a little American celebration.  After learning about some of the American symbols, we made flag cookies out of graham crackers, icing, twizzlers, and sprinkles.  The kids had a blast.  As we made the cookies we discussed the meaning of the flag again.  They did a great job remembering that the stars stood for the 50 states, the stripes stand for the first 13 colonies.  They even remembered that red stands for courage, white stands for making good choices, and blue stands for justice.  Here are some pictures of our celebration.