Sunday, November 1, 2015

October has come and gone!

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!
 
 [Sigh!] So busy and it continues!  This week we have the 50th day and we’re starting our farm unit!  I can’t believe it’s already November.  Three more weeks and it will be Thanksgiving break then Christmas! OMG!!!  This post wasn’t as quick as I thought!  Haha!
-Cindy





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