Wordless Wednesday - Halloween!

Happy Wednesday! Thank you to Miss DeCarbo for this fun and quick linky!

This year we have cut back on the number of "parties" allowed in class. The only "parties" we can have are at Christmas and the end of the year. During other holidays we can have a special snack during our 15 minute snack time. As hard as it was for me to let go of all the fun games treats I have done in the past, I think it turned out really nice!

Halloween Special Snack - A+ to the amazing mom that made these too cute cookies for the kiddos to enjoy during snack time!

Halloween with my beautiful nieces!

Love spending the weekends with these girls!

How do you celebrate special days in your class?
Leave a comment and then head over to Miss DeCarbo's blog Sugar and Spice and check all the amazing Wordless Wednesday posts!

Five for Friday - Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!!!! I hope you all have a frightfully great time this weekend! I am joining Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday - barely!

 Yesterday (Thursday) afternoon IT came and reimaged my computer. Do you know what that means? They wiped it completely clean and it is just like brand new. I did know this was going to happened so I have every thing backed up (I hope!) on an external hard drive but now I have to make time to transfer all my stuff back over. I am hoping they way I saved things on the hard drive will make it a little less painful. I just hate that right now I cannot find a thing on this computer! Please forgive the lack of pictures as they are somewhere between the cloud, my external hard drive, and the 3 flash drives I have floating around!

 

Is it just me or are the kiddos loosing their minds. My class has been EXTREMELY active - more so than the normal "it's almost Halloween and the weather is changing for the 100th time" active. I have really dug into Class Dojo. Have you tried this? I am loving it and so are my kids. I customized all the positive (dings) and negative (dongs) points and meet with each child at the end of the day to let them know how they have done. At the end of the week, students with enough points visit the treasure chest. Students can also go online with a code and personalize their avatar - hello OWNERSHIP! Parents can also go online with a personal code and see how each day has been and at the end of the week Class Dojo sends them a weekly report. I love how easy this makes marking my behavior sheets at the end of the day. It also makes giving conduct grades at the end of the quarter effortless and equitable!

A Plea For Help!

 This year I have quite a few kiddos that do not know letter names and are having a hard time learning them. We have amazing tutors that come in and work with small groups to help these kids but we are seeing limited progress. What do you do with your kiddos that are having trouble with letter names???? All tools and suggestions are welcome!

 As you may have seen in my post earlier this week, the AMAZING Pixie Anne from Growing Little Learners nominated me for the Liebster Award. I am so honored and had to give her one more shout out of thanks!!!! Check my earlier post for the 11 amazing blogs that I have nominated - they are all so amazing and deserving!

Today my beautiful nieces are coming down for Trick or Treating and I cannot wait until I get off work at 6:00 (I work at our After School Childcare program) to go play! My amazing husband is surprising them with a hayride for their transportation around the neighborhood. Who walks when you can ride on a trailer filled with hay!! 

How are you spending your Halloween weekend? Leave a comment below and then head over to Doodle Bugs Teaching and see what others have been doing this week!

Creepy and Spooky Wordless Wednesday

I love this time of year! This week we are gearing up for Halloween by learning about Nocturnal and Diurnal animals - aka all things that are "creepy and spooky". These owls are one of my favorite art projects. I love to see how each student interprets the exact same directions!

 This guy is a rebel! He is "floating" in the air instead of sitting on a limb!

 We discussed one owl that looked like he had ears but really they were just feathers. I love to see what they pick up on!

This one if from one of my OCD kids! He said he could NOT mix the colors! :)

What are you guys doing to celebrate fall and Halloween? Comment below and then join Miss DeCarbo and let us know!

Five For Friday!

Happy Friday! I hope you all survived Halloween and Post Halloween! We had a fun and crazy week. I am definitely ready for the weekend! I am linking up with Doodle Bug Teaching to share with you 5 random things from my week. 

We had a wonderful party thanks to my fabulous parents. These kiddos sure are going to be spoiled this year! A HUGE thank you to the families that sent in items, to the three moms that came Wednesday to help make cups and bags and the moms and grandmothers that came Thursday to help serve these wild kiddos! I am so proud of the Frankenstein cups! They turned out so cute and were super easy. I don't remember where I found the idea, I am sure Pinterest but I could not find the pin. For the cups we just used sharpies to draw on the face and hot glued Rolos on for the bolts. For the punch we used 1 scoop of lime sherbet and then filled with Sprite. The kiddos loved the bubbles. We also had pumpkin cookies and "Mummies in a Blanket".

My kiddos LOVE Onomatopoeia!!! I was amazed at how easily they caught on and how even three days later they were talking about it and asking to add words to the poster!

This week we finished our AMSTI Science & G.L.O.B.E. unit on weather and clouds. We  had such a great time learning about clouds. Every time we go outside, my kiddos start naming the different clouds they see. 

Today is just one of those dreary rainy days that I miss my babies and wish I were in my chair at home curled up with them reading a book! So for the first time all week, I plan to leave school early and actually go straight home. No working late, no running errands, nothing! What do you like to do on rainy days? 

 2012 Mamma Mia - Spaghetti Western 

Again saving the best for last: Next Saturday is Daphne's educational foundation's, SEEDS - Supporting Education Enrichment in Daphne School, Mamma Mia Cook Off! The Mamma Mia cook off is in front of the Daphne City Hall on Main Street. Last year our theme was "Spaghetti Western". We won 1st place for the second year in a row for our recipe and we won the Mamma Mia Award - 1st place for spirit! Next week we will be preparing and cooking and hoping for another 1st place victory! If you are in the Daphne, Alabama area, come check it out. The cost is $30/person in advance and $35 at the "door". 

What five things are on your mind this week? Link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching and let us know. I hope you all have a fantastic weekend!

Melissa

Witchy & Wild Things Wednesday!

Happy Halloween Eve!!

I just wanted to stop by and give you an update on how my Wild Things project was going.

Monday we read the book Where the Wild Things Are and made our very own wild things. We have been talking about adjectives so we made a list of adjectives to describe our wild things.



Tuesday we started talking about opinions. The kiddos were full of them but were stumped when I asked them why they liked what they liked. That took a little longer. When I asked if they liked the book or not, I was afraid that everyone would say they liked it. Luckily I had one person say they did not like it. This worked out perfect. Her reason for not liking the book (it was about monsters) ended up being a few of the kiddos reason for liking it. We had a great discussion about how our opinions are never wrong but we can always change them. After watching the video on Discovery Education we had a chance to discuss more reasons whey the kids liked/disliked the book and who liked the book or video best.

Today we read and watched different book reviews. Two for Where the Wild Things Are and two on two different books. We discussed the different parts in the reviews. The kiddos are getting really excited about writing their own reviews. Today, we also wrote about when we feel wild. I am so impressed with their writing, it keeps getting better and better!

Tomorrow we will write two different book reviews. First we will review Where the Wild Things Are. We have been orally reviewing the book all week so it should be the easiest way (fingers crossed) to teach them the format. (Here is my form!)

Today we also made pattern witches. They turned out too cute!!!! I found the idea on Pinterest. I will say that considering the picture on Pinterest is work by 5th graders, my kiddos did AWESOME! Next year I will have them all turn their paper "tall ways" and only give them half a sheet of black paper to make a skirt. That way they have more room to actually make a pattern with the legs. For the shoes, I folded a piece of black paper in fourths and just drew a shoe and cut it out. I love the different placement of the feet and the different directions they turned them.

I am headed to the kitchen to make some mummies in a blanket for our Pumpkin Party tomorrow! What fun treats do you guys have planned for Halloween with your kids?

Melissa

**Cooking Update**

I used two cans of crescent rolls and a large package of beef smokies. I unrolled the roll, patted the rolls into a sheet of dough. I looked for the uncut roll of dough but I didn't see it this time at my store. I used my pizza cutter and cut small thin slices of dough (see above). I wrapped the strip of dough around the smoke and left a gap near the top. I will put small dots of mustard on them tomorrow for eyes. I also made a few regular piggies in a blanket for the grown ups and just some blankets for anyone that doesn't eat meat. (see below)

 Toasted Mummies!

Five For Friday!

Happy Friday! Being out a day this week has really thrown me off. I have been a day behind all week and my post this week proves it! I seem to have forgotten to take pictures of some of our projects this week but I promise to come back and add them ASAP! 

This week we have been doing a lot of great creepy, crawly, and spooky things the past two weeks and I have picked some of my favorites to share with you all this week. A lot of the ideas/lessons came from Pinterest. (See my Kindergarten Creepy & Spooky Board Here.)

Night Animals

To begin our creepy and spooky unit we began with some not so creepy or spooky night animals. I even learned something new - animals that are awake mostly during the day are called diurnal. We played a game (from A Place Called Kindergarten) using a double Venn Diagram to sort different animals. Then we took a deeper look at bats and owls. We read fiction and nonfiction books as well as watched the Reading Rainbow about Stellaluna, which had some fantastic bat facts.

 Bat Glyphs from the book Critical Thinking Glyphs (Teacher Created Resources) 

Torn Paper Ows (from here)

 Go Away Big Green Monster

I was actually out with the lovely stomach flu and my sub did this with me kids. They read the book and then did a directed art project to create their very own Big Green Monsters. I also found (from where I don't know) a Flipchart for my Promethean Board with this story. As the kiddos retold the story using the Promethean Board, they drew their version of the monster. I have since seen a few different versions of this activity that are really cute and have them create the monster as you read the book the first time and not showing the pictures. I have put that in my file to try next year!

 The Little Old Lady Who Wasn't Afraid of Anything

For this lesson we read the book and talk about all the sounds that the old lady heard. I teach them the word onomatopoeia and we make a list of the words from the story. My kids also thought of their own words so we added them to the list. If they had their way, the scarecrow would have been covered but it was time for lunch  so we had to stop! (I got the idea for the cute anchor chart from Welcome to Room 36.) I also have a Promethean Board  Flipchart called The Strange Visitor. It is very similar to this book so we make a Venn Diagram of the two.

 Inside a House That is Haunted

This is one of those times where I had a cute activity and needed a book to go with it. In this book, a kid dressed as Frankenstein scares all the residents in the haunted house. Since I found this very cute directed art idea from here I though, why not! I also found a video of the song Monster Mash on YouTube that shows the mad scientist bringing Frankenstein to life. The kids LOVED it!

I saved the very best for last! I have to brag on my wonderful school. This week is Red Ribbon Week. Each year the third grade students are able to apply to win the Red Ribbon Week Award by sending in proposals for a service project. The staff votes on the service projects submitted to choose a winner. This year our service project was "A March for Super E" to support a former student of ours that was diagnosed with cancer last year (& in remission now!!!) to help cove expenses. Students made donations to the Super E Fund in order to participate in the march. If they sent in $5 or more, they could bring and wear a cape as we marched. We had set a goal of $1500 but our FABULOUS students raised OVER $3000!!!!!! I am so proud of our students and their families for donating so much to such a great cause! 

Don't forget to check out the other Five for Friday posts at Doodle Bugs Teaching!

(I edited my photos on piZap.com)