Halloween Week

Helllooooooooooo hello hello!!

This is going to be kind of a long post so bear with me. Sorry, the past week was pretty busy with Halloween on Thursday and report cards going home this week! (Does anyone else feel like they blinked and it was suddenly November? How is the first nine weeks already gone?)

Here are the highlights from our week:

In whole group language arts, we started using our alphabet trays to match our alphafriend letters to magnetic letters.  This gives the students something hands-on to do as we recite the letters each morning.  As I say "A, /a/, Andy Apple," they search for the matching "a" on their board.  When they find it, they move it to cover Andy Apple and repeat "A, /a/, Andy Apple."  Since this is a brand new routine, we're still getting used to it and going in order.  As we get better at finding the letters, we can do them out of order.  This is also a *great* way to quickly assess who knows their letters and who is struggling.

We also got PEN PALS! I contacted Cameron's teacher last week and she was really excited about the idea.  So our class discussed who Cameron is and where he goes to Kindergarten before writing our first letter to Mrs. Welborn's class! While this starts out as shared writing, by the end of the year students will be able to write letters to individual students in Mrs. Welborn's class and her students can write letters to individuals in our class.  Until we get better at writing on our own, we'll have to work together on the letters!

In math we are focusing on counting forward by 1s, 5s and 10s and backward from 10.  We also worked a lot on graphing.  You can see our Halloween graph in the next photo.  Here you'll see the rockets we made to help us recognize numerals and count backward!  I *love* the phonetic spelling of the numbers, HAHA. 

Of course we had fun learning Halloween-style! Below you can see (from left to right):

(1) The goodies I gave the kiddos when they left (glow sticks inside a Halloween straw with a note that said 'Happy Halloween! You light up my life! Be safe trick-or-treating!" (2) The graph we made using Halloween erasers (found in the Target Dollar Spot). (3) An activity we did after reading Arthur's Halloween.  We made text-to-self connections, filling in the blank in the sentence "Arthur _________ on Halloween. I did, too!"  (4) & (5) Feeling the inside of our pumpkin during the pumpkin investigation. (6) Our class jack-o-lantern! The shapes cut were decided by popular vote.

In Science we've been focusing on the seasonal changes by writing in our "What Happens in Fall?" book.  We'll finish this next week and kiddos will be bringing them home upon completion.  I didn't get to finish coloring page 1. oops.  I love making books like this.  They bring together science, writing and math (numeral formation with the page numbers at the bottom).  Love it.

And outside of school, here's a bit about what was going on in my personal life:

I have obsessively-compulsively checked the lock on my car door for years by tugging on the handle to verify it was locked. Apparently when you do that, you eventually break the handle. To the point where it falls out. So for the past three weeks I've been crawling through my passenger's side door.  Real awkward like.

Lucky for me, Padre paid for my handle to be fixed as my early birthday present.  (THANKS, Dad!) So I took it in on Thursday. Since the part Mazda ordered wasn't right, they had to give me a loaner car overnight. HAHA. Of course they gave me a brand new CX-5 with a mere 2,000 miles on it. So I extremely carefully drove straight home instead of doing anything else. New cars make me nervous. Plus, I didn't want to get too used to all the bells and whistles of a new car.   Now I have my car back, with a working door handle! I almost forgot how convenient it is to just open a door and get in.

So, long story short - even if you are extremely OCD, don't check your car locks. It still makes me anxious not checking them, but I've learned my lesson...