Our Pumpkin Fun!

You all. I don't know how I survived last week! Full moon. Red Ribbon Week. Parent/teacher conferences. And that little thing called Halloween. Oh, and inside recess on the day before Halloween... It was a VERY tiring week! Thank goodness for Starbucks and lots of GoNoodle! 

We managed to fit in some pumpkin fun! We started off with some nonfiction books about pumpkins, including 

We had our kids work on main idea and details, and also illustrating the life cycle of a pumpkin. {Of course I failed to take pictures of their work!! Boo!}

We compared and contrasted apples and pumpkins together, then our kiddos filled out their own venn diagrams. 

Our kiddos still need some extra practice with adjectives. It seems to be a tough concept for some of them. I saw this idea a few times in Instagram and Pinterest and just knew we had to do it! We gave each table a pumpkin and a sharpie. First, they brainstormed adjectives that described their pumpkin. Then, they took turns writing the adjectives right on the pumpkin! This was a big hit! We still had some friends who wanted to write things like, "They grow on vines," or, "They have a stem," so it is something we need to keep working on. However, I do feel like we had some a-ha moments. And we had a cute little adjective pumpkin patch outside of our room when it was said and done!

We did some pumpkin estimating and investigating! Students worked in groups of three and had to estimate how much their pumpkin weighed, how tall it was, the circumference of it, and how many lines it had. Then they had to find out the answers. They had a lot of fun with this!

Last but not least, we did one of my favorite craftivities! Again, we worked on adjectives and had our kiddos describe the outside of a pumpkin. Then we cut a couple of pumpkins open and had them describe the inside. Then we made our inside/outside craftivities! The kids thought these were the coolest things around :) 

If you have made it this far, take a peek at my little family's Halloween costumes! Mr. Hubs made quite the Richard Simmons!! HA!

Hello, October! Pumpkin Fun + a FREEBIE

 

You all, I just LOVE fall!! I cannot believe it is October already! Baby girl turned 7 weeks old on Sunday! Boy, how time flies! She will be 2 months on the 10th of this month.... Which means I only have a little over five more weeks home with her :(

 

 

I went up to the school last week to bring my team some donuts and let them see/meet Mia! I also got to meet my students really briefly! I am so thankful for Amy and that we are team teaching, and that we have our AMAZING friend, Katy, subbing for me! I have been told we have a pretty awesome group of sweeties, so that will make going back to work a little easier :)

 

Since I won't be at school to celebrate all things pumpkin, I wanted to just share some pumpkin themed products from my store with you! Click on each picture to check them out!

 

 

{This cover needs an facelift... BADLY!!}

 

{This is a FREEBIE!!}

 

And just for fun, here are some pumpkin fun photos from the past! Since I currently have a sleeping baby in my arms, it is kind of difficult to type, so you can click HERE to read old blog posts about our pumpkin fun in previous years :) But enjoy these photos!

 



 



 



 

 

 







 

 

 

 

Happy fall, y'all!!



Five for Friday, Pumpkin Seed Fun & Spider Freebie!

Oh man, TGIF, you guys!! I am linking up again for Five for Friday! You should link up, too!

 

 

#1: Our sweet boy, Ashton, wrote this during work on writing the other day. I don't think he knows how much I needed to read that. This year has been a stressful one, not with students, but with paperwork, nearly impossible expectations, RTI, feeling like we can't teach because of all this stuff, etc. Anyone else feeling like this? I hate, hate, hate it :( But this little guy must have some kind of intuition, because he always seems to know when we need to hear or read something like this. We always say he has such a wise soul.

 

 

#2: We took our sweet niece and nephew to Mr. Hubby's family fall festival for work last night. Cutest little butterfly and polar bear that you ever did see!

 

 

#3 is all about pumpkin seed fun as we wrapped up our pumpkin unit! We used Abby's Pumpkin Seed Data freebie. We also used pumpkin seeds to write doubles story problems, since we are working hard on addition strategies!

 

 

We also used seeds to work on estimation. In the past I have done pumpkin seed estimation where they take seeds out of pumpkins and make groups of 1s, 10s and 100s... Well, we wanted to do something a little less messy, a little quieter {HA} and less time consuming, so we estimated how many seeds it would take to cover up different sized pumpkins! I have a few versions of this activity in my Fun With Pumpkins pack.

 

 

To end the unit, we did our inside/outside pumpkin craftivity! We had done a lot of our observations last week, and just opened up two more pumpkins to review today. The kids always love this craftivity, which can be found in my Fun With Pumpkins pack :)

 

 

#4: Our school received a STEM grant this year, so yesterday we had our first training. I am working on a mini-pack to go along with this Skittles activity, and it should be posted soon, along with more details... :)

 

#5: We will start our spider unit next week, which, believe it or not, I am excited about. Have I mentioned that I HATE spiders?! :) We will be using this freebie from my store. Pick up a copy by clicking on either picture. {Can someone explain why the pics are gray!?!?}

 

 

And I have also updated my Spider Facts to include a mini booklet, a large writing piece, and some extras. It is now 20 pages! Pick up a copy by clicking the picture below!

 

HAPPY WEEKEND!

Pumpkin Unit Photos {Part 1} Plus a pumpkin freebie!

First off, I picked a winner. I just closed my eyes and scrolled. Congrats to Tania, I landed on you! I have sent you a copy of your Spider Fact Booklet! Enjoy :)

You guys, we finally started our pumpkin unit!! I am so excited because in my mind it means that the holidays are coming! Yesterday we started our unit with a KWL chart. Our kids had great schema about pumpkins, but were so excited to learn more. We listened to Life Cycle of a Pumpkin in our basal reader. Yay for good nonfiction text!

 

Today we reread the story for fluency, and really dug deeper into the text. Today was also our fun pumpkin investigation day! We sent a note home asking students to bring a pumpkin to school, in hopes of getting 15 so that our kids could work in groups of 3 {remember, I team teach, so we have 45 kiddos!}. Well, we got enough pumpkins to have a mini pumpkin patch in our classroom. Our families rock! So our students were able to work in pairs, which made for happier teachers :) I love the variety they brought.

 

 

To conduct our investigation, we used this freebie from my little store! Can you tell this is from my early TpT days??! :)

 

Students had to make estimates/predictions before they began. There were 5 stations in all. They counted the lines on their pumpkins, weighed their pumpkins, measured the circumference, measured how tall their pumpkin was, and found out if a pumpkin sinks or floats. Our awesome Watch D.O.G. helped out with the sink or float station :) I looooved seeing how surprised some of them were to learn that a pumpkin floats! Here are some pics from The Great Pumpkin Investigation!

 

This afternoon we put a pumpkin at each table. Students used their senses to come up with adjectives to describe the outside of a pumpkin. There were some great discussions going on! I think our kids are really understanding adjectives, PTL!

 

Then... drumroll please...We. Opened. The. Pumpkins! And they got to observe the inside! As in they got to TOUCH the inside. Say what?!  It was better than Christmas morning! At least they sounded that excited.

 

Again, they came up with adjectives to describe the inside of a pumpkin. We made this anchor chart {which will come in handy next week with our inside/outside craftivity!}

 

 

The last thing we did today was compare pumpkins to apples. We set out a real pumpkin and a real apple to help them out.

 

 

We filled out this venn diagram together. Please excuse the scribble on my chart. Anyone who knows me knows that it really, really bugged me and I really, really wanted to whip up a new anchor chart. But, there was no time. Our kids did an amazing job comparing and contrasting pumpkins and apples!

 

 

We ran out of time, so tomorrow I am having the kids fill out their own pumpkin and apple venn diagram from my Fun with Pumpkins! pack!

 

I will be posting some more about pumpkins sometime in the next week or so, so be on the look out! We will use lots of activities from the pack below!

 



 

Happy hump day! We are halfway done!