50th Day & More!

Wow, has this been a crazy week! I'm blaming it on the Full Moon and Halloween - things have been insane around here!

First up, our 50th day of school fell on Halloween. For some reason my room was designated the dance room. I taught the kids The Stroll and they were sooooo super cute! First we watched this video, then we formed up in lines to do it ourselves:

Some of the boys were big hams and happily danced hand in hand with the girls, while others were little stinkers who didn't want anything to do with holding hands lol. Either way they had a great time.

Next we watched this video to see how they fast-danced in the 50's:

I made sure everyone understood that we were going to keep our feet on the ground and then I let them at it. We twisted and shook and jived like crazy! Then they got to go onto the next rotation while I repeated the whole thing with the next group. We had 4 groups in all, and they rotated every 20 minutes, so I was exhausted by the end!

The other rotations were: watching 50's cartoons (umm why didn't I get this one??), hula hooping and doing other 50's games in the gym, and making a 50th day necklace. I have to brag just a little bit and let you know that my own kiddos were by far the most enthusiastic dancers. Some of the other groups just wanted to look at my aquarium and hermit crabs lol!

Well the kids got to go home early that day and the teachers got to stay for some fabulous meetings. which of course we couldn't finish in the time allotted to us, so now we will have even more fabulous meetings in the near future! Did I mention that we also have a wonderful behavior management meeting once a week now? We get to watch videos together and see innovative ideas like having a sharpened and unsharpened pencil basket (ooh why didn't I think of that?! Oh! Wait! I have those in my room already!) and using call backs (umm Queen of Call Backs here! We love making up new ones when we do an author study, and of course we can never line up without a song from my free Line Up Songs pack.) but hey, I'm all for waking my 4 kids up way early so I can come in to watch a video!

The rest of the week went well - come back tomorrow for some exciting news - I was going to share it today but predictably I forgot my camera at work!

We had our Fall Carnival on Friday night. I am the PTA predident and pretty much the onyl active member, so I set the whole thing up - from buying all the food and prizes, setting up all of the games, making signage and flyers, cooking the cheese and chili for the nachos, getting the bouncy house set up (our PE teacher helped with that!) etc. It started at 6pm and up until 5:50 I had my 4 kiddos and another staff member's child as my only helpers. Needless to say I was beyond frazzled, BUT it went really well! By that I mean that no one had any melt downs, people actually played and paid and ate and paid and we actually made a little bit of money!I am hoping that with this one under our belts we will be a) better prepared for the next one and b) have more involvement since it was a success!

Get this...I even ran a face painting booth at the Carnival! Wait, why aren't you rolling on the ground laughing? Honestly, if you had ever seen my drawing skills you would be laughing your head off right now! My kiddos are always very gracious and say that they believe that the random squiggles and lines I produce are actually the thing that I am trying to draw, but I know they are just humoring me. Imagine my surprise when they lined up to let me paint on them! That's true love for you, almost made me tear up!

Alright, off to watch The Walking Dead with the husband tonight, but first I have to share my new unit! I actually edited my old November Math unit since it was one of my first units and sorely needed updating. It is now a 99 page MEGA Thanksgiving pack with 10 Math centers and 4 ELA centers! Check it out here:

Oops! forgot to give a shout out to my blogging buddy Wendy from Teacher's Toolkit. She is having a huge giveaway right now! One of the prizes is your choice of anything in my store! Head over to enter!

Pumpkin Fun! (Freebie)

We had a great day today! Here are some pictures of our pumpkin fun:

 We had 3 different types of pumpkins that we examined, measured and scooped out!

For each pumpkin we estimated and then counted the seeds. I scooped all the seeds into baggies and then broke the kids into groups to count the seeds into these little plastic trays in sets of 10.

Here's what 346 seeds looks like broken down into 10's:

Here are the seeds from the three types of pumpkins - the first one is from our pie pumpkin, the second is from the white pumpkin and is noticeably thicker and the third is from the large pumpkin:

Tonight I am washing and roasting all of the seeds and we will compare how the different varieties taste tomorrow!

We planted seeds from each of our pumpkins. Each student chose which kind of pumpkin they wanted to plant, labeled a baggie with the pumpkin type and their name and then placed 2 seeds in the bag with a damp paper towel. In the next few weeks we will be charting which variety sprouts first!

We also had a great turnout for our Pumpkin Character Book Report:

 Isn't this buffalo adorable? I have no idea what the tongue is made out of - maybe some type of roofing material?

 Here's Gerald from Mo Willem's Elephant & Piggie series. This one really touched me because it was made by the child and his great-grandpa since he was staying with them while his parents were out of town. 

 Ok...want to know something gross? When I set this pumpkin out in the hallway after lunch it had cut up marshmallows as teeth. By the time I took this picture at the end of the day, all of the marshmallows had been pulled off and eaten!

 We had 3 different versions of Clifford!

 Love this Silverlicious pumpkin! This little girl was soooo excited to have made it - she got the book from our Book Fair and has talked of nothing else since!

This girl's daddy read her this book as a bed time story, one chapter each night. She's already reading independently way above grade level, have to give him props for being a very involved daddy!

I think this little one wins the "most props" award, again, there was a baggie of cut-up marshmallows with this one as little fake "teeth" but it did not survive even 1/2 a day :(

We also did our Favorite Candy Corn tasting! Here's our results:

As you can see the Green Apple candy corn are very popular with Original Flavor coming in 2nd. You can grab the graph for free here!

 Have you ever tried eating candy corn and peanuts? I had several teacher tell me its quite good! They told me this as i was wandering down the hall after school with my left over candy corn, looking for random kiddos to sugar-up. It was my own private mission to send as many students home on a sugar-high as possible - insert evil laugh here - and I managed to sugar up quite a few teachers as well - who knew candy corn was that popular?! 

Alright, I have seeds to wash and roast and our 50th Day to prepare for tomorrow! I created a roll & cover just for the occasion! Grab it here as a freebie!