Sunday Summary: What We've Been Up To

Wow the time has been flying! October is almost gone which means its time for Red Ribbon Week and Halloween! Here's a look at what we're doing:

We've been getting a lot of mileage out of our Halloween themed erasers! I bought more this year, and along with my pumpkin ice cube trays (which are perfect ten frames!) we have been having fun counting to 10, sorting and patterning!

  

 Here's an ABC pattern  - most of my kiddos have caught on to patterning very easily this year!

Some of my kiddos are going on to higher order math skills "If we have 4  cats, how many bats will we need to fill up our tray to 10?"

 

Some are still working on one to one correspondence so the erasers are fun counting practice for them!

I needed a Halloween craft idea for our bulletin board, but the K class down the hall did torn paper pumpkins and put them on display before we could! I love torn paper art projects because they're such good fine motor practice, not to mention easy on prep! I thought on my feet however and turned our pumpkins into a shape/positional word activity! We painted our pumpkins with these texture brushes:

Then the kiddos cut them out and glued on the shapes to make their jack o'lantern faces. We created the face template on our Smartboard first - discusing which shapes to use for which facial feature and where it would be placed in relation to the other shapes. 

Next time I'll make our arms and legs shorter, but I think they turned out super cute for a last minute change!

Our Red Ribbon Week doors are starting to pop up along the hallways. Unfortunately we have run out of most of our butcher paper, there's no more black or blue so our dedicated teachers have had to get creative!

This one is from our Special Ed. Coordinators door - she painted the pink paper black and then added her galaxy. Her students created the stars that form the border and each had a reason for being drug free on it.

We have plenty of yellow paper left, so our Title I tutors made this door with a bunch of drug-free rhyming quotes. I have a feeling they will inspire some great doors next year:

I love this door from our Title I Coordinator and Counselor! Those owls are precious and might be a future craft in my room!

My door is not finished yet - that's our Monday craftivity! I'm still torn between two ideas so you'll have to wait and see which one I go with!

Our Sand & Water table has corn in it now:

I bought a huge sack of corn at our local feed store. The kids have gotten very good at sweeping up any spills, so we aren't bringing down any custodial wrath :)

However, even though this looks cool, and the kids were ultra proud of themselves, it is NOT a good idea to stack the full buckets on top of each other:

Two seconds and one excited jump after this picture was taken and those buckets tumbled, spilling corn everywhere!  

That's all for now - off to work on those Red Ribbon Week door ideas and make sure I have something red to wear for tomorrow!