Happy Halloween!

Happy H-A-Double L-O, W-Double E-N!

We had such a fun day!  This is our class right before the costume parade around the school.  After the parade we had a Halloween Party in our room... beginning with spooky touchy-feely story about Poor Old Joe and his body parts!  (We are studying bodies in science, after all!).   We felt a Spam tongue, peeled grape eyeballs, cold spaghetti brains... well, you get the idea!  Then it was on to the Mummy Race, Halloween Four Corners, and lots of yummy treats!  Thank you so much to all of the family members who came to our party or contributed snacks!  We loved sharing our day with you!

But alas, all good things must come to an end, and Wednesday we were back at it...  

We have started doing "circus math".  We rotate through a Three Ring Circus every day.  One ring is Redbird math on the computer, an adaptive math program that targets skills at each child's level.  (They can access this program at home through our blog, and are free to go as far as they like at home! 😉)

One ring of the circus is a hands-on math manipulative.  Here the kids are  playing a dice game and making shape graphs depending on what number they roll on the dice.  

And finally, the third ring is Teacher Time, where we meet in groups and go over the lesson concept for the day.

In science this week we built on our studies of the nervous system and brain, and learned about the muscular system.  

One of the kids' questions when we began our unit was, "How do our muscles move?"  So we played spinal cord telephone, a silly game I made up to show the kids how nerve impulses travel from the brain, down the spinal cord and to the muscles to make them move.  We started with a thought in the "brain"(the first child in line), and passed the message down the line to the "muscle" (the child at the end), who then had to perform the action that the brain thought up!  The action  in this picture was "stick out your tongue!"

Here the kids are putting some of the different systems together on the body.  Next week:  the digestive system!