With Halloween around the corner, you can imagine all the excitement in our classroom!
Our pumpkin inquiry is still going strong! This past week we opened the top of the pumpkin and looked inside. We documented what we saw, we smelled and we felt!
The RECE I work with, Mrs. Petrone, and I will be branching off our students wonders by having them describe the pumpkin in detail (using synonyms) and counting seeds. I may just ask the students if they are interested in roasting and eating them too!
Here's a peek at our centres this week:
At our felt board, I made 5 pumpkins, a gate and a moon. Since we have been chanting this poem for the past few weeks, students know it and can retell it here!
The felt board is from Tiny Feats.
Our families have been so generous sending in craft materials for Halloween that we started setting some of them up at a table for students to use and create!
At our games table we set out this fun game of Tic Tac Toe - with a Halloween twist!
You can download this for FREE by clicking the picture below.
I just added Halloween loose parts from the Dollar Store (bats, ghosts, pumpkins, spiders, etc.) and we drew other images on these clear gems for students to design and decorate a haunted house at the light table.
My teaching partner, Ms. Frois, lent me these large wooden Halloween cut outs so we added loose parts for students to decorate them with.
We have a fun STREAM challenge out this week...can you build a box for the pumpkin?
STREAM stands for Science, Technology, Religion, Engineering, Arts, Math in our board.
Can you pick out the spiders using the tweezers? We added a 1 minute timer to make this even more challenging!
We added pumpkin placemats at our playdough centre.
These placemats are from my October Religion pack.
In our sensory bin, although it's a little hard to see, each small cauldron has a touch of baking soda and there is a container filled with vinegar on the bath tray. Students can use the large syringe to squeeze vinegar inside. Oh, and the water is tinted purple, with glitter of course, to make this even more spooky!
Since our students love Halloween so much, we set out simple books (2 papers stapled together then cut in half) along with this Halloween vocabulary chart - which you can find in my
Writing Center Posters pack HERE if you are interested.
I've had many requests to share more about our small groups that we run each week so I'm going to try and include more of those pictures each week also.
Here is our activity for our Letter i.d./sounds group.
This is a felt board set I bought years ago from a kindergarten conference I attended in Las Vegas.
There's a poem that students chant along to - 5 Little Letters - and then they choose a letter and say the name/make the sound.
In our fine motor group, students can use these zipper/button/snap mats to practice!
In our math intervention group, students will be working on identifying/extending/creating simple patterns using these Halloween cut outs.
In my Math: Problem Solving group (where I meet all students in small groups throughout the week to review our main concepts in math), we will be creating our own patterns following a pattern rule. I left out bear counters, coloured tiles, and a bunch of loose parts to use.
You can download everything you need from my Patterning in Kindergarten unit by clicking the picture below:
With our sight word group, I will be playing this game. It's called Roll-Say-Keep.
Roll the die, read the sight word and keep the card!
Here are my weekly plans if you'd like to download!
If you would like the editable version to modify this for your own class click HERE.
The original blank PowerPoint file has been uploaded onto Google Slides but the formatting has changed.
Enjoy the week!
