We are fully into Halloween mode, with skeletons, bats, spiders, witches' brew and pumpkin everything! In writing we are working on sequencing, and so we took the opportunity to write about carving a pumpkin! (We'll carve our pumpkin following our steps next week!) . We did a guided writing together, and then the kids each wrote their own piece. Then they made shape jack-o-lanterns to help practice the names of the shapes. Here is our pumpkin patch!
We were so fortunate this month to have Sonya Bitz come in and teach gymnastics to the kids during P.E.! Here is a great shot of her teaching them how to jump and stick a landing! They LOVED learning gymnastics.... thank you so much Mrs. Bitz!!!
We also did some exercises in class to learn about how exercise affects our bodies! Here the kids are doing some yoga!
We tried this week in science to answer some of the kids' questions about the heart, such as "What does the heart look like? What is inside your heart? How does your heart beat? What happens when we exercise?" In order to do this, we took our pulse at rest, and after exercise. We learned how the heart pumps oxygenated blood to our muscles and organs by watching a great video of a real heart beating before it was transplanted. The kids were amazed, and drew their own pictures of what a REAL HEART looks like!!! Finally, their favorite center was the "create your own model of a heart" station. With plastic tubing, turkey basters, and building tubes, the kids got to try out their own pumps and try to model how the heart works!
After we made models of the heart... I used Play Doh to plug up one of the "arteries". This led to a discussion of cholesterol, and how we can keep our hearts healthy. We talked about healthy eating and avoiding high-fat foods, and sorted the food in our toy kitchen into heart-healthy foods and foods that are not good for our hearts. (We will get more into nutrition soon!) We did a messy and fun experiment to see how much fat is in certain foods. We smooshed foods like donuts, fried chicken, chocolate, apples, and carrots onto a piece of paper to see which ones had the most fat in them. The ones that were fatty made our paper translucent when we held it up to the light.
A definite highlight of the week was our Halloween Book Buddies party! We made a collaborative book with our Fifth Grade buddies called Witches' Brew. Each Book Buddy pair came up with their own rhymes about what to put in our witches' brew and created an illustration to go with their page. They were super creative and gross! Some of their ingredients were bat wings, eyebrows, glue, mud, stinky heads, squished bugs, rotten apples, and guts, just to name a few! Our book will be displayed in the hallway as a "walking book", so look for it when you come to Trick or Treat Street!
We had fun reading our book together at the end and trying some "real" witches' brew... complete with creepy crawlies, skeletons, eyeballs, and spiders! Hee hee hee!
And finally, in some rather creepy news, I must tell you that the skeleton that I brought into our room to help us learn about bones has been very naughty. Each night he or she wanders around and gets into our dress up bag... finding a different crazy outfit to wear each day! The kids are always thrilled in the morning to see what he or she has put on, but as for me, I am not crazy about the idea of a skeleton wandering around our room at night!!!
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