We had a great day!

 First, a few pictures of Shapey from last week.  Shapey lives on planet Zoop and he wrote a letter telling my class that he wanted to make a picture of himself for his dad's birthday, but he hurt his arm and couldn't draw, so he just told us what shapes to use (1 pentagon, 4 squares, 2 rhombuses, 4 circles, 5 rectangles, 2 triangles), that he was symmetrical, and that his nose had 4 sizes.  Then everyone went to work.  It was a bit challenging, but we had fun and everyone's picture turned out differently, whether they looked like a cat, had 3 eyes...
  

And now onto today's awesomeness:

We took the letters in Thanksgiving and built words.  This is the first time we've tried this type of activity this year.  Look how many words your brilliant children made!

During math centers we made solid shapes (cubes, rectangular prisms, pyramids, triangular prisms, even 1 pentagonal prism) from marshmallows and toothpicks.

 

 A rare picture of myself; reading a fun Thanksgiving story.

 Here we are on our walking field trip through our school's neighborhood .

And now we are ready to tally the different types of transportation that drive by.  We got pretty enthusiastic.

 A bus driver (my dad) came and read a familiar bus story.

 Science time: can you spot the light source?

 Looking carefully at the photo mosaic of Van Gogh's Starry Night.

I hope your day was as amazing as ours was!

Buddies!

Our buddies came today and helped us with some research.  Everyone got to pick an animal they wanted to learn more about.  Our buddies did a great job of helping us read and find information.  :)

Calves, necklaces

We all went into the trailer and peeked at the calves.  We picked up some BIG bottles.

Various children feeding the calves (most pictures are of the backs of their heads because I was trying to act as a buffer between the calves and one scared child)

Going closer and petting them

Say "Moo"!

We went inside and recorded our observations

(It looked scary.  It felt soft.)

(It looked cute.  It felt slimy.)

The picture above has slightly more accurate colors than the one below :)

Later in the day some children worked on spelling words (he's spelling kindergarten)

For art we cut straws and strung them to make necklaces - lots of fine motor fun, and the best part was watching the straw pieces fly when we cut them.

Leaf Day!

 It started with a leaf hunt

Then  we sorted the leaves we found

 and graphed them by color and then by shape.

 We also played a leaf number game.

Science time: making observations and recording them.

One student had leaves shaped like hearts.

 These leaves are from a grandma in Michigan several years ago.

 After reading some leaf stories we wrote our own leaf story.  Some were silly and some were more realistic.  The authors stood to read.  Notice the other students practicing good listening skills by looking at the speaker.
 
We played another leaf game: climbing the 'tree trunk' to drop leaves on the target.

  

HAPPY FALL!

We ended with our Leaves Are Falling poem and throwing our construction paper leaves into the air (the only way to have fall-colored leaves fall during Fall in Phoenix).