October 25, 2012

Firetrucks, Bats, Spiders....Oh My!!!

Dear Parents,

Oh My!!!  I did not realize that it has been 24 days since my last post.  We are so busy having fun learning new things that we are too busy to blog about it!! :)

Earlier in October, during Fire Prevention Week, we had special visitors to come and teach us about how to prevent fires and what to do in case of an emergency.

In Reading, we read several texts about Bats and Spiders.  The students really enjoyed sequencing the story Stellaluna and making bats.  We also read the story The Very Busy Spider during Curriculum Connections with Mrs. Driggs.  They loved making edible spiders from marshmallows.

In Math, we are continuing our unit on Counting and Cardinality.   Practice.....Practice....Practice
The students are expected to count from 1-100; count from a given number except for number 1; such as start at number 53 and count on; counting in patterns by 2's, 5's, and 10's; and compare numbers 1-100.  The students are having most difficulty with teen numbers.  Most of them ask me "what does number_____ look like" when I am calling out random numbers.

Today, we participated in Pumpkin Math.  We measured our pumpkin; counted how many ridges it had; estimated the number of seeds it would have; counted the actual number of seeds (can you believe that we counted by 10's to 550!!) and described the texture of the pumpkin.  BTW, ice cream is on me tomorrow!!
I had to encourage the students to feel the "guts" inside the pumpkin by promising to purchase them ice cream!!

Thank you, Mrs. Maganelli for the pumpkin and thank you, Mrs. Driggs for volunteering and cutting out our pumpkin!!
Thank you for all of your support!!  Happy Halloween-
Mrs. Malone

Happy Fall Ya'll

I apologize for not posting last week, but I have been SUPER busy with conferences and amending all my students' paperwork before a set deadline. :) And, we started new units in both Math and Science! We have had so much fun with our new science unit on senses and physical properties.

To introduce our unit, we had our first visit to the  discovery lab! Thanks to all the parents who volunteered, the kids LOVED having you there! The focus lesson was "All About Our Five Senses".

We also made OOBLECK! Hopefully some of that crazy substance made it home in their baggies for you to see! The students were mesmerized about how quickly it turned from a liquid in your hands to a solid once it dripped onto the table!

The fun continued with using our sense of taste, smell and touch to try and guess different foods that were put in front of us. (Lemons were not the most popular food choice!) :) Then, we sorted the foods by color, smell, taste, seeds/no seeds, etc. 

In math, we practiced making our shapes using shaving cream and hair gel. This was definitely a hit and something we will do again.

Thursday we made models of apples and labeled them, to hang all around our classroom to make our room look a little more "fall-ish." Today, to add to our decor we made leaf people that turned out so cute!

We also had Curriculum Connections on Friday with Mrs. Kampling.  Thank you so much for the wonderful taste test experiment with apples.  Hands down, our class favorite was apple pie!!!

Thank you for coming to the Fall Festival on Saturday! It was so much fun! The best part was sliding down the SUPER SLIDE with Eva.