Fall on the Hall!

 OK, I have to introduce you to the amazing teachers/friends that I work with at Providence!  I was able to get most of my team in action but still have to snag Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Fowler.  You're next, ladies! 

We all make a Thanksgiving Book but we each include our own favorites. Ms. Potts teaches her students about the type of home the Wampanoags actually lived in.  They make their own for their books and write a sentence with a fact that they learned.

Ms. Potts really works with her class on journal writing and it shows!

So proud of their hard work!

I love how happy they are to show off their work.

Ms. Holzer's class gets detailed with their scientific observations on their class pumpkin.  They paint the paper plates and then label the parts of the pumpkin.  She likes to work on this project in stages.

She made a display in the hall with her pumpkin vines, Stellaluna fruit bats and Spiders in the Web.

Her class will write spider facts and include this page in a Fall Science Book.

Mrs. Booker's class estimated the circumference of their class pumpkin and checked to see who came the closest in length.

Mrs. Johnson's class made Number Turkeys!

Mrs. Johnson always has something up her sleeve...I was walking by her room during my planning time and noticed her entire class sitting on the carpet QUIETLY listening.  They were playing Silent Bingo using initial consonants and loving it!

So quiet...I mean you could hear a pin drop.  Even when I rudely came back with my camera and interrupted the whole process!

Just another fun way to learn those initial sounds.

The cover of her Thanksgiving Book.

I had to include a photo of her huge Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree!

Going Batty!

I decided at the last minute (last Sunday night) to add a short unit on bats and compare/contrast them with birds. I haven't finished all of our activities yet-most of which I got from www.kinderbykim.com but I wanted to share what we have done so far! 

We started by reading Stellaluna,
one of my favorites!

Then we made our own cave for both our bats AND our bear who was getting ready to hibernate.  Our Scott Foresman story for the week was A Bed for the Winter and we had already read Bear Snores On so the timing was just right.

Everyone tore a piece of brown paper and a piece of gray to cover the box with "rocks" to make it look like a cave.



Everyone helped and some got pretty enthusiastic with tearing the paper and with gluing! 





The next morning we made our own fruit bats and each child told me a Bat Fact as they came up to tape their bat inside the cave.  They love their new scientific word, echolocation!





Our colony of fruit bats!





Stellaluna follow-up sheets







After we read our non-fiction books about bats and birds we started to talk about their differences and similarities.




We made our first Venn Diagram.



Next we wrote in our Science Journals.

Of course, we also had to watch The Magic School Bus video, Going Batty!  We will still make Batty "at" families and write more about Stellaluna but that was my very brief Bats unit!