Fun Fall Activities

Wow...this year is flying by! We've been having so much fun in the classroom working on all our fun fall activities. I'm so glad I finally found some time to share them.  

We painted pumpkins and wrote a
sentence describing
our pumpkins.

This was our pumpkin glyph.

 We decorated our bulletin boards outside our classroom with our scarecrows and tissue paper leaves The poem on the tissue paper leaves was a fantastic pinterest find! We lined the wall with our "fall is" pictures. Students cut out the tree and sun, then glued on ripped orange, brown, yellow, and red construction paper for the leaves. They had to complete the sentence fall is...which I typed and cut out in the shape of a cloud.

Fall is...when the leaves start changing colors and falling off.

We had to show our class tree changing with the seasons as well. We finger painted with fall colors to make leaves which we added to the tree and ground below.

 We tried the Autumn Blend Candy Corn and graphed which one we liked best. Students also made a big candy corn and wrote about it ...I like the __ candy corn.

 Of course we did a study on bats. We did a step-by-step bat drawing. They added a moon to show their bats flying in the night then had to write a bat fact.

         

 One of my favorite books to read this time of year is Stellaluna. Click here for a copy of the beginning, middle, end paper.

We also did a unit on spiders. Kids created a spider which they had to add a spider fact to. The kids marble painted spider webs with white paint on black paper. Then they created 1, 2, or 3 purple thumbprint spiders. They completed the sentence __ see ___purple spiders.

Spiders can bite people.

As it got closer to Halloween we made some footprint ghosts and some Frankenstein Monsters. 

We also did a pumpkin investigation of the outside of a pumpkin. Then of course we scooped out the inside and carved a face into it. 

 Our Halloween was filled with lots of exciting centers. We made ghosts (bananas and chocolate icing), spiders (Oreo, black licorice, icing, and skittles), and boogers on a stick (pretzel sticks and green cheeze wiz).  Another fun center was pin the stem on the pumpkin.
















All of the other pictures have students faces so I don't want to post them. I can tell you that we had number bingo, sight word bingo, ghost drop, roll and count spider legs, Halloween patterns, Halloween circle map, Halloween write the room, planting pumpkin seeds, Halloween card making, alphabet dot-to-dot, more/less/same Halloween pictures game, Halloween book and bones bingo song. Pin It

Who doesn't love a HERO!!!

Zero the Hero!

My favorite math activities are our Zero the Hero days. Zero the Hero comes to visit us when ever our 'day in school' ends with a zero. On that day, I put up Zero The Hero by our calendar. The students get so excited when they see him in the morning because they know that means he's left us a special surprise somewhere in our classroom. Throughout the day the kids see if they can find his surprise. 

Once it is found we celebrate by doing a song from Jack Hartmann called 'Zero the Hero exercise and count' from his cd...

Zero... 

the Hero!

We then guess what we think is in the bag and how many objects he has put in it. Sometimes it's candy, which they get right then, and sometimes it's new or old classroom toys. This time he brought us 30 blocks for our math tubs.

We also get to color his picture in our calendar folders during calendar time.

For more great ideas you can visit Mrs. Shehan's site. She has a list of activities for each of the Zero the Hero days.

Of course our 100th Day of School is a huge celebration. We have even more fun with Zero the Hero that day!!! I'll save that for another post. 

Please comment below if you have any ideas or suggestions to add to our zero the hero fun. =)

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Math time-Calendar

This is our calendar board. Our daily schedule is from Mrs. Carroll over at The First Grade Parade. Above our schedule is our learning targets. Our team has decided to use weekly targets with our math topic, letter, sight word, and science topics for that week. We go over this daily first thing in the morning. We use Brownie Points as a class incentive for doing good deeds. The class can earn them by showing respect, listening, and following directions.10 brownie points gets the mystery prize under the question mark. Next is our calendar and weather chart.


This year I started using a calendar journal everyday (a wonderful blog find). I'm loving my calendar time now so thank you to all of those new blogging friends! Our start in September was a little rocky, but by now the kids can do it without me and it's great.


Here's what it looks like:
The students each have their own 3 pronged pocket folder. Inside is a calendar, weather graph, days in school, tally chart, zero the hero, birthday chart, and tooth chart. Most of these will stay for each month, but  I will add or change pages out so that it doesn't start to get boring. For instance, I just added a days of the week paper with the October calendar. To make this time more exciting I also loaded the pages into an ActivInspire flip chart. While I'm demonstrating on the board the students are working in their folders. Here are some pictures of us working in our Calendar Folders...

Active Inspire Chart

Filling in the calendar

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

Each week I have a weather person who tells us the weather and reads the sentence. The class will then graph it in their calendar folder. At the end of the month we go over the data.

Here is how we do our days in school. We add a straw for the day, count the straws, then the calendar person writes the number and puts up the correct number word. I got that sheet from What The Teacher Wants. She has an amazing post about her calendar time that you should check out.  The class then writes the number in their book and adds a tally mark for that day on the tally chart.

We also color Zero the Hero on the days that end with 0. I LOVE Zero the Hero days...check out my post dedicated to him!

When we have a birthday, students add the name to our birthday chart. They can copy the board if they don't know how to write the name.

The last thing we have is our tooth tally chart. Every time someone looses a tooth we add a tally mark for that month. We also have a chart in the room so we add the students name to that chart.

If your interested in any of the documents above or are interested in starting your own calendar folder here are some links to those blogs that introduced it to me...

Many came from Kathleen over at Growing Kinders. Here is a link to her most recent post about her calendar folder. She also blogged about it here in March. 

Another great blog about them was from Stephanie over at Aloha Kindergarten.

My folder cover and calendar pages came from Ms. Gonzalez's Classroom Website.

The weather and tally pages came from Heidisongs. She also offers some literacy printables that can go into your calendar folder.

Shari Sloane has a site with some great printables too including the zero the hero page.

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Open House

Open house was a huge success this year! I was so excited to have 16 out of my 18 students show up for this very important night!!! Here are some new pictures of our classroom with all our work on display. The kids were so excited to show all of the parents their hard work over the first couple of weeks. :)

I found this idea off of Pinterest and loved it!   We read this cute rhyming story to go with it.

We talked about all the different colors and about how fun it would be if we could paint ourselves. We then traced our arms and hands and painted them. When the paint was dry we adding lines and shapes to it. Once the poster was complete it turned into a helping hands lesson and we talked about why we should help each other and about working together.

Over in our writing center we graphed which hand we right with. I do this every year and every year the kids are amazed at how many kids write with their right hands. Of course after this lesson they all try the other hand to see how hard it really is!

      

Our self-portraits are one of my favorite activities. While looking in a mirror, each child drew the picture first  and then they painted it. The speech bubble contains the answer to the question...What do you like about Kindergarten?

This was our very first homework assignment. Students took the leaves home and decorated them with personal pictures, magazine clippings, or drawings of their favorite things. We shared them and then put them up on our family tree. This tree stays up all year and changes with the seasons. Stay tuned for more pictures of it!

Our second homework assignment was our me dolls. Students brought home a "me doll" template with the goal to decorate it in order to tell us a little bit more about them. They are always so cute and really show each students personality!

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I Heart Your Blog Award!!!

I am so excited!!! My blog received it's first award! =) Ms. Trinh over at The Teacher Tattles has given my blog the "I heart your blog award". This blogging world is so new to me, but I'm loving all the fantastic ideas I've found. This school year will truly be the best because of all these wonderful blogs (it really was hard to pick my top 10):

 1) Pass on the award to the Top 10 blogs that have inspired your teaching.
2) Contact them, and let them know of their award.
3) Copy & paste the award onto your own blog, giving a shout out to the person who nominated you. Pin It