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!

Marvelous Math and other activities

 Some very studious girls hunting for the letter h, or any words they know.

Not the greatest picture, but a fun game: roll the die, read the word, move the car in the corresponding lane.

 My favorite Samuel picture, uploaded sideways though.  At first the speech bubble by Samuel was empty because, as the artist put it, "He was scared.  He was like this-" and she stood really still and made her eyes really wide.  "Then he said ___" (Sorry, I don't know how to spell a gasp, but apparently it is spelled with an H.)

 Today in math we took flat shapes, like a rectangle

 and then worked together

 to make rectangular prisms!

 Math is so much fun!

 A few groups joined forces during center time to make an even bigger prism

 But it got too tall, so they built it horizontally instead.

Math Art

 It looks like a collection of junk, but really it's math art!  We picked different shapes (math) to make a collage (art) and let the sun fade the paper around it (science too!)

 Each child had a turn to share their cool project with the class.

 More awesome math: symmetry paintings!  Just paint, fold, squish, and re-open.

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).

Funky Friday

 Today was Funky Friday! 

 In our morning message we found lots of letter r's and tried to figure out all the sounds it made.

Math was delicious this morning! After learning about ordinal numbers we ended our color theme with a Brown Bear activity: coloring, sorting, counting,

graphing

 recording our graphs and FINALLY getting to eat the m&m.

 Thanks to Shannon over at Kindergarten Hoppenings for the sorting mat and graphing page!

 At the end of the day our buddies came over and we drew rockets, painted fire, and then painted our rockets and outlined them with black.  Everyone was working for an hour, but no one complained!  Some of the rockets look really cool.  Next week they will get cut out and glued to the fiery backgrounds.

Oh, and remember those uniform shirts that have been in the closet for the last couple weeks?  Pull them out because next week will be a 'normal' week, whatever that means.  :)