Pumpkins, pumpkins, everywhere!

It was another busy and exciting week in kindergarten!  We had lots of fun this week incorporating HALLOWEEN into just about EVERYTHING we did!

We did some pumpkin science, making hypotheses about how long our pumpkin would last before it got mushy, and learning about how bacteria makes pumpkins rot!  We carved our class pumpkin on Wednesday, after voting for different shapes of it's face.  We began learning about the voting process, which we will be touching on more as the national election gets closer.

We estimated how many seeds were in the pumpkin.  We had guesses from 100 to a million billion.  Sawyer was the closest with his guess of 110.  The actual number was...... 528!  We all helped put the seeds into groups of 10, and then counted to 528 by 10's!  We ate some of our pumpkin seeds, and used some to glue onto our pumpkin seed counting squares.

Mrs. Abel from UAF extension came to visit us again, and talked about pumpkins and other orange vegetables and fruits as a part of our nutrition unit.  The kids got to try sweet potatoes, squash, carrots, and golden raisins!  Most of them liked everything, and the ones that didn't were very polite, as Mrs. Abel had instructed them to discreetly spit it out into their napkin and quietly walk over to the trash can.   When I asked Emma if she liked the sauteed squash she said.  "No.  But I am eating it anyway.  'Cuz it has my favorite thing EVER on it!  SUGAR!"  But guess what?  Mrs. Abel had not put any sugar on the squash, only a little bit of cinnamon, and as she cooked it on the skillet the sugars caramelized.  It was delicious!

We used pumpkins to practice shapes for math.  The kids created jack-o-lantern faces out of trapezoids, hexagons, circles, triangles, squares, semi-circles, rhombuses, and parallelograms!  They had to tell me the names of the shapes they used on their pumpkins.  We also practiced tracing hexagons when we made our wax-resist spiderweb art!

In writing we learned how to use "kid spelling", or sound spelling.  The kids drew pictures and wrote about their Halloween costumes using kid spelling.  They did great!  It was so exciting for them to be free to write on their own, and it will help them recognize the sound segments in a word, as well as give purpose to learning all of these letter sounds that we have been working on.

In music we sang and danced to lots of fun Halloween songs, including one that helps us learn how to spell H-A-Double L-O, W, Double E-N!  You can listen to it here!

We also had a visit from the Tok Volunteer Fire Department.  They taught the kids how to stop, drop, and roll, dial 911, memorize their address, and about all of the fire fighting equipment.  I loved how the kids integrated their fire safety information with the nutrition unit when they had center time at the cabin.  The cabin turned into a restaurant serving food from all of the different food groups, and then it caught on fire, and they had to put it out!

On Friday we had a visit from our 5th Grade Book Buddies!  The kids have been waiting and waiting for our first Book Buddies party, and were super excited when the day finally arrived!  We read Halloween stories all together, and then they had time for their buddy to read to them in the school library.  After our reading time, we came back to the classroom and played Halloween Bingo, Halloween 4 Corners, and decorated pumpkin cookies!  We will continue to get together with our Book Buddies once a month!