All I can say is wow! October came and went soooo fast! This month we went on a field trip, went to
the KToT Conference, our classes preformed at the P.T.A. meeting, my birthday, we
had a math and science night, Jumpstart Read for the Record, pumpkin decorating
and the storybook parade…No wonder we’ve been so exhausted lol!
I’m just going to give you a
quick rundown of some of the things that we’ve done. This year our pumpkin patch field trip was
early in the month. We went to Mainstay
Farm which has to be one of the best places to take our little ones in the
whole world. The students get to dress a
scarecrow, play in a huge sandbox, jump around on hay bales, play in a three
story tree house, ride on a hay ride pulled by a tractor, and before they leave
they get to take a pumpkin home.
We were photo bombed by two of my students!
That same week Sandra, myself and
two other co-workers had the opportunity to attend the KToT Conference in
Houston, TX. We didn’t take many
pictures since it seems like most of the sessions we attended had to do with classroom
management. We did see some amazing
presenters one of them way Dr. Marcia Tate the author of Worksheets Don’t
Grow Dendrites. In Mary Jo Huff’s
session we had a blast in making puppets and different types of foldable
books. But my favorite presenter was Dan
St. Romaine who took us through a two sessions that talked about teaching kids
to encourage self-regulation and independence. We bought his books some really great stuff
from him. He has these really awesome
song books for the different procedures in the classroom. We were very excited to hear that his song
books are in the process of being translated to Spanish!!! You can order them from his website. It was a fun and refreshing conference for
us!
My birthday was on the 13th
of this month and for my birthday I went to the Marc Anthony concert with one
of my coworkers and friend Maria. We had
a blast singing and dancing our hearts out!
That week we also had Jumpstart Read for the Record and Sandra and I
both had two really awesome “Celebrity Readers”! I had my friend AJ who is a police officer in
our great city of Fort Worth. Sandra had
her brother read to her class and said the kids really liked him too! The book was Not Norman and was such a
sweet story about a little boy who didn’t want his pet fish because he thought
he was boring. In the end he learns just
how cool of a pet Norman actually is.
Now to some seasonal
activities! In our Pumpkins, Pumpkins,
Everywhere unit we have this cute glyph!
I actually left for a really awesome sub that I had (she’s a retired
teacher) and they came out really cute.
I precut everything except for the eyes.
The kids had to either cut out circles or triangles for eyes. She said it went very smoothly! Also, on facebook one of the teacher I follow
posted a Frankenstein Monster directed drawing activity. We think directed drawing activities are
really good at building confidence in their drawing skills. First we read a super cute story named Crankenstien,
then drew our monster and wrote about what made them cranky. They did a really great job on them! The website for that one and lots of other
directed drawing activities is: artforkidshub.com.
Our librarian with help from our
P.T.A. bought pumpkins for each class to decorate for our school “Storybook
Pumpkin Patch”. This was fun Sandra and
I used the same book we were using for our storybook parade costumes. Mine was a super simple “Superkid” and Sandra’s
was the “Rainbow Fish” her amazing part-time teacher assistant took her
direction and ran with it. It looked
adorable! All of our teachers did an
awesome job!
For our storybook parade this
year I kept our costumes very simple! I
had my students where red shirts which was easy since it was Red Ribbon week
and they had to wear red on Friday anyway!
Win for me! J Instead of making them, I bought masks from
Party City and made capes out of a spare roll of plastic table cloth my friend
Leslie had. They kids looked super! Sandra’s costumes were really cute! They made rainbow fish scales out of circles and
added glitter. I especially liked that
she carried around the cover to the Rainbow Fish big book she had to
make in college! It still looks great!
Sandra decided to start the class
Boo game. I heard, she came to our class
knocked on our door a few times and ran away with her class but as it turns out…we
were in the library so boo for us! My
kids were still excited with the bag of goodies they left us. Then we got to Boo! another class. It was a lot of fun! Speaking of goodies, I usually make my kids a “Halloween” goodie
bag. This year Sandra and I did some
Halloween snacks for our kids. I made
the ghost cheese sticks and mandarin cup jack-o-lanterns. Sandra’s class made Frankenstein pudding
cups and she baked them mummies. I thought
they looked great!
-Cindy
