Let the Christmas Countdown Begin!

17 school days left until Christmas break!!!

Thanksgiving break was fabulous! We spent a lot of time with family, the hubs and I braved Target at midnight on Black Friday, we put up Christmas decorations, I deep cleaned the house (it was long overdue!!) and we just RELAXED. It was a great break, but like always, it seemed to go by super fast :)

I am not gonna lie, it was a bit hard going in to work today, BUT I am super excited for the next three weeks! We started our Grinch Week today and I am so excited! I will be posting photos of our activities later this week :) I am also thinking of posting this mini unit on TpT, but I've got to look into it! Next week will be our Gingerbread week, then Christmas Around the World, then BREAK! This is my absolute FAVORITE time of the year! It is CRAZY busy, but so fun!

Hope everyone has a wonderful week, I cannot wait to see everyone's Christmas ideas :)

Turkeys, Turkeys Everywhere!

Happy Sunday, friends! I cannot tell you how ready I am for Thanksgiving break!! I am counting down the days until I get to chow down on my mom's awesome cooking! I sooo envy those of you who are already on your break! :)

This past week we focused more on turkeys and what we were thankful for. In our basal, we read A Turkey for Thanksgiving. It is such a cute story!! We read several other books about turkeys and Thanksgiving, including my FAVE, 'Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving! Soooo stinkin' cute!

If you haven't read these with your kiddos, do it! :) We did a quick writing prompt, "If I was a turkey on Thanksgiving..." They had some clever responses!

Well, I wanted to share just a few activities we did this week...

I always have my kids make Thankful Turkeys. They have to write about five things they are thankful for and why they are thankful for those things. They came up with the sweetest ideas!

Then we worked on sequencing in our writing. As a class, we wrote "How to Bake a Pumpkin Pie." After we did that, they had to write "How to Cook a Turkey." They came up with some funny directions!

It's always funny to see what temperature they think a turkey should be cooked at :)

Tomorrow and Tuesday we are going to focus solely on the Pilgrims and Wampanoags, and we will do this cute activity I found on Pinterest! We will also have our FEAST!

Hope everyone has a fabulous Thanksgiving! Enjoy time with your family, and eat a lot :)

Veterans Day & Patriotic Week

We had a Patriotic/Veterans Day mini unit this week and the kids were all about it! Here is my bulletin board, thank you Cara @ First Grade Parade for this idea (although yours is cuter!!)

We started the week reading Red, White and Blue in our basal for a little history lesson on our country and our flag. We listened to it, then they got to read it to someone the next day during Daily 5. Then I read The Pledge of Allegiance to them.

This book is awesome at showing what each part of the Pledge actually means! It is something we say every single morning, but most of my kiddos didn't know what they were really promising. I made up a quick booklet for them to fill out afterwards. They had to write what each part of the pledge means, then answer a few questions about the flag at the end. They did great!

Heads up: this is NOT cutesy and I just hand wrote it because I was impatient and wanted to get home :) But it did the job!

 

I read them several other books about different symbols. A couple that I really liked, and that were easy for them to understand were these ones:

 

After we learned all about symbols, we made a cute booklet that my friend had given me a couple years back (that I completely forgot to photograph!) The kids were all about it, and couldn't wait to take it home to teach their families all about America's symbols of freedom!

We talked a LOT about freedom this week, and how our troops sacrifice everything to protect our country. We wanted to thank our soldiers and veterans for all they do for us. One of my little girls has a dad who is currently deployed, so we decided to write letters and draw pictures for him. They were SO into it, and the little girl was just SO excited and proud! LOVED IT.

On Friday, we had our Veterans Day assembly, and then I had my dad come talk to my class. He did really great :) I was happy he decided to come!

Then to end our mini unit, I had my kiddos write about their freedoms in America and make little Bald Eagles... although some ended up looking more like pigeons because I accidentally left the giant googly eyes in the bag for them to choose from!! They are still cute :)

^ That is how I intended the eagles to look :) 

This week was  a bit crazy with the Full Moon, but we survived, and I can tell that my students LOVE America and are so proud :) Can't wait to start Thanksgiving stuff for the next week and a half!! Then can you believe it'll be Christmas??? YAY!

Pumpkins!

I cannot believe it is NOVEMBER! I am so excited because 1). My dad came back from his deployment in Turkey! 2). It is fiiinally starting to cool down and feel like fall! 3). Only 2 1/2 weeks until Thanksgiving! 4). Then only 3 and a half weeks until Christmas break!! THIS IS MY FAVORITE TIME OF THE SCHOOL YEAR :)

We have pretty much wrapped up our pumpkin unit, and it's been fun! As I said in my last post, we did quite a bit with the basal last week (due to PT conferences) and read The Life Cycle of a Pumpkin and really focused on a pumpkin's life cycle!

This book is an amazing look at the life cycle, too!

We practiced sequencing by writing the about a pumpkin's life cycle using words like first, next, then, last, finally, etc. I forgot to take a picture, but we made the cutest craft to illustrate the life cycle of the pumpkin! Wish I had photographed it! Oh well :)

This week we observed, described, estimated, graphed and measured using a pumpkin (and pumpkin seeds) I brought to school.

We first observed the outside of a pumpkin and wrote down all of the adjectives we could think of to describe it. Then I carved the pumpkin open, and the kids to got to see, smell and feel the inside of the pumpkin! They LOVED it! Some thought it was nasty and would not touch it though :) Then we wrote all the adjectives about the inside of it. My kiddos completed a craftivity and had to write at least 3 sentences to describe the outside of the pumpkin and 3 to describe the inside. These turned out so stinkin' cute, and they were way into it!

 

Here is a photo of our pumpkin anchor chart (as well as our seed adjectives for Pumpkin Seed day!)

The next day was Pumpkin Seed Day! First we all got a few pumpkin seeds, and we had to look at, feel and taste them! We wrote adjectives on the giant seeds (see photo above) and we graphed whether we liked or disliked the taste of the seeds. We used Abby's cuh-yoot Pumpkin Seed Data and All About Pumpkin Seeds record sheets!  

That afternoon I read

 It is a great introduction to what it means to estimate! We looked inside our pumpkin and estimated how many seeds we thought were inside of it. Our estimates ranged anywhere from 12 to 101. My kiddos worked with their tables and had to make groups of ten.

After they finished counting their seeds, we added up the class total (great mini lesson on regrouping!)The grand total of seeds inside our pumpkin was.... drumroll please.... 253! Our closest estimate was only 152 off :) But they had a great time!

Today we worked with partners to measure our pumpkin using standard and nonstandard units of measurement. They did AWESOME!

Tomorrow we are playing catch up and doing lots of math games and activities. I am all pumpkin-ed out :) Can't wait until our Patriotic mini-unit next week!

Have a fabulous weekend!