Story Houses

The days are darker now and one good thing about that is that right about when school is starting we have some gorgeous sunrises out our window!  It is getting a little hard to do the weather chart in the mornings!

We are continuing our study of the human body... putting together skeletons and learning about muscles and other organs.  We also are doing a lot of reading nonfiction books about the body, looking for facts, and learning how to do research on the computer.  Here the kids are using MYON reading to look up books about bones.  MYON is one of the programs accessible at home, through a link on the side of our blog.  The kids LOVE it because they are able to search for books on any topic they like!

Our big focus this week was on learning about "building a story."  We use tools to write, just like we use tools to build a house.  So the kids built "story houses" and got very creative with the halloween theme, turning them into Haunted Story Houses!!!  

To reinforce this idea, we even had fun with some real tools in the classroom!

Here are some of the "tools" we use in writing, that we will be focusing on this year:  Organization (who wants a house where the basement is on the roof and the walls are inside out?), Ideas (like the lights coming on in our house!), Word Choice (like paint that we use to make our stories colorful!), Conventions (like periods and spaces between words that make a story readable), and Voice and Sentence Fluency, that make our writing personal and interesting to read!

I love teaching writing to kinders, because it is so fun to see the progress the kids make in one year, and how excited they are when they can actually put their thoughts down on paper and get creative!

Here we had fun one day, coming up with Halloween words that started with B to practice our letter of the week and kid spelling!

Thursday night the kids performed in a concert at the GAP dinner, showcasing some of the Halloween songs they have been learning in music.  They did such a great job, it was very cute.  I mean spooky.  

This week there are lots of Halloween Festivities going on:

Wednesday at 2pm we will have a costume parade around the school.  Students are encouraged to bring a costume, but not to wear it all day.  We will help them get dressed before the parade.  After the parade, around 2:15, we will PARTY in our room until about 3pm.  You are all invited! The kids will go home on the bus.  There is no GAP that day.  Then Trick or Treat Street is from 5-7 at the school.  There will also be a Halloween Carnival going on in the lunchroom at the same time.  

Thursday's agenda includes lots of tired, grumpy children coming down from a sugar rush.  

Happy Halloween everyone!