And that was Halloween week... whew!

This was one of those weeks when I look back at the pictures and can't believe they all came from the same week!  

We began the week by finishing our study of the body.  The kids came up with some questions about our brains that we endeavored to answer! 

We studied the nervous system, comparing it to the game of telephone!  The first person in the chain was the "brain" and the last person was the muscle, who had to do what the brain told it to do!  We also studied parts of the brain, and watched some really cool videos on the electrical impulses in our brains when we have thoughts.  We learned that we really do have "brainstorms!"  We learned about making "new roads" in our brains, that turn from pathways to four lane highways the more we use them.  It was a neat way for the kids to understand the importance of practicing over and over, and having patience with the process of building new roads in our brains!  

As a capstone to our unit on the body we took a field trip to the TCC Clinic!  Thank you so much to Daryl Brinkman, Michele Flagen, and Alicia Combs who accompanied us!

The kids learned about the heart, how to brush their teeth, and how X-rays work!

Thank you so much to the TCC clinic, they always do such a fabulous job on our field trips!!!

We are working hard on color words.  We've used color by numbers to practice.  Here the kids are looking up color words to figure out the color code!

We carved our pumpkin this week!  We voted on what kind of eyes, nose and mouth to carve, and had fun getting nice and gooey scooping out the guts!

This week we also learned about estimating, or making an educated guess.  So we estimated the number of seeds in our pumpkin!  We saved them all, separated them into groups of 10, and practiced counting by 10's to find out how many we had.  We were all surprised!  Trulee Norwest got the closest, with a guess of 300.  There were 519 seeds!

We had some fun furry visitors this week!  Lucas used his Pet Shop card to bring in his dog, Boone to visit.  Boone shook everyone's hand!  He was so patient!

Grayson also used his Pet Shop card to bring Goose!  Goose was such a sweet cat who visited everyone and had fun exploring the classroom.  We wanted to keep him all day!

We had a fun visit from Mari Hoe-Raitto, the A-Chill teacher for the district, who also happens to be Tora's Grandma!  She taught us about dog care, dog mushing, and brought some super nice dogs for us to meet!  The kids learned how to care for a sled dog with booties, jackets, training, etc., and then got to go outside and pretend to be sled dogs, practicing the commands of "Whoa, gee, haw, and let's go!"  It was great practice on following directions, teamwork, and learning left and right!  We plan to do many more sessions with Mari as the year goes on!  

Finally it was Halloween Day!!!  The kids were so cute, and so excited.  We had a costume parade, but we are always so busy on Halloween... I forgot to take pictures of the kids!  At our party we played the touchy feely game with body parts from Poor Old Joe, Halloween Four Corners, the Mummy Game, and had delicious treats. THANK YOU to all of the families who brought snacks and stayed for the party!!!

Still reading?  I told you this was a busy week!  We came to school the day after Halloween and discovered that our pumpkin had grown hair!

We took advantage of our rotting pumpkin to learn about mold, fungi, and decomposers.  We took a sample and looked at it under the microscope.  This led to looking at many other things under the microscope all day... but we went with it!  The kids were fascinated. 

Here is the mold from our pumpkin under the microscope!

So, after watching a cool video on how decomposers turn all of the dead plant and animal matter into soil, and different ways that people try to stop food from decomposing before we eat it, we decided to do an experiment!  We had one control group, and four other groups to test different methods of stopping or slowing fungi from growing.  Our ideas were fridge, freezer, oil, and salt. We will check our experiments next week to find out our results!