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!

Happy Monday!

 Look at the great alphabetizing the class did last week!  And they can read most of the words too!

 

 Math centers this morning: finding lots of ways to build triangles and hexagons.

 Measuring transportation with links and cubes.

Building with house blocks.

 More transportation fun at the end of a social studies lesson

Hopscotch!  Don't worry, I preface this with a "Don't do this at home" and "only the teacher can write on the carpet."

Humpty Dumpty writing: How would YOU put him back together again?

by hand (see all the yolk and shell pieces?)

 I would use glue.  (Look at that great spelling!)

 

Tape him up so he can walk again.  (More great writing and great spaces!)

I didn't put him back together.  I put him in the hospital.

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).

water, paint, glitter, glue, sand, apples

Apple day started with apple math.  We graphed our apples by colors and by whether or not they had a stem.  Then we measured our apple's height,

and weight

 and tested if it would float or sink

 Some apple centers: making patterns,

 making apple fingerprints to match numbers

We did non-fiction writing

 apples are good. they help us grow.

 apples are yummy

In science class we made a diagram of an apple and labeled the different parts.

and at 2:00 we finally got to eat the applesauce that we had smelled all day long.  About half of the class liked it (some could not get past the fact that it was chunky and warm).  Everyone at this table had seconds or thirds despite one of them telling me ahead of time that they didn't like that kind of applesauce.

 No pictures of our awesome apple seasons art - we were too busy with glue, paint, sand and glitter... but since we already had the mess out, we had a messy art option at center time.  

 

See this creation?  It features glue, sand, glitter, crayon, and dot markers as the media.

 And since the water table was filled from the morning, that center was also open later.

Update: here's an apple seasons picture:
 

It was a very messy, very fun day!