Fall Has Arrived!

    Well, it is finally Fall out here in Northern California! It arrived right when they said it would... in November! This year is predicted to be an El Niño year and lots of rain is expected this winter. We shall see... I will take rain over snow any day! For now, I will enjoy my November, filled with chilly mornings and weather in the 60s and be grateful that I do not have to even think about dealing with snow!  =)

    Things have been busy on the school front, as usual, and time is going by just way too fast! Am I the only one that feels this way?? I feel like we are doing so much that I can't wrap my head around it, let alone try to keep up with writing blog posts about everything.

     Recently, we learned how to say the name and color of pumpkins in Spanish. 

We also learned all about the La Vida De La Calabaza and created a mini book!

They created their own calabazas (jack o' lanterns, really, but who cares?) They are cute! 

And the kids really love the independent art actvities that I put out for work time. 

There seems to always a line at the Art Table!

And I kept a few pumpkin themed math activities out on the shelves through last week:

Roll & Cover:

 Counting Pumpkins:

    With Thanksgiving right around the corner, things are likely to get crazy hectic. The past few weeks, I have found that I feel frazzled and can't seem to get organized with my afternoon literacy lessons and activities. I really need to get on that because the literacy activities that I have done with my small afternoon group have been a hit and they are ready to learn more and keep moving forward.     We have the week of Thanksgiving off and I intend to use that time to get organized and keep those munchkins focused during what is always the craziest time for teachers... Christmas! Anyone counting the days yet?  I sure am not... because at this rate, I know it will be here in the blink of an eye!

Where has the time gone??

   Wow, Halloween came and went so fast and it seems like we just wrapped up our Pumpkin unit, and now I am planning Thanksgiving and fun turkey activities. The time is just going way too quickly for me! I feel like I have had zero time to sit down for a few minutes to blog...
 Anyway, here are a few pics of our Pumpkin fun from earlier this month.
 I snagged this super cute and super fun activity from Miss Kindergarten, that I used through Halloween and into early November:

    I had to tweak it a bit for those muchkins who are working on letter identification, so I modified it for my pocket chart that I use with my small groups:

     We worked a little bit on measurement, and used foam (and later wooden) cube blocks to measure the different heights of our classroom pumpkins. They found that stacking foam blocks past ten wasn't working and towers kept toppling over, so we switched to wooden blocks.

They really enjoyed working together to measure our huge pumpkin:

We took a few days to learn about the life cycle of a pumpkin and created a little diagram:

We also learned the poem "Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater" and created this very CUTE craft! 

I am in love with it and I don't want to take them off of my wall to send home! 

Now we are just about to wrap up a our Fall fun, even though it is already snowing!

 I am telling you, time is going way TOO fast!!

Letter Pp has become Pretty Popular!

    Wow, as I sit here and get ready to share all I have done with the letter Pp (at home and in my classroom), I realized that Pp is pretty  popular!

    Seeing that we have still been on a Pumpkin Palooza high, my little munchkin and I did some work with the letter Pp. I utilized many resources that I have found over the past few weeks that I just love!

    I purchased a Letter Land pack by Live Love Laugh Everyday In Kindergarten, earlier in the school year and it has become one of my faves to use.

    I had the little munchkin search for the letter Pp.    

Click here or the pic above to grab your own copy of this great resource!

    

Then we used these Phonics bookmarks created by Lidia Barbosa over at Kinder Alphabet. I LOVE these! Great way to save paper and practice skills!

 There is so much in there and I will be using it in my classroom very soon!

                      

   Click the picture below to purchase your own pack. 

    And the Pumpkin Palooza and Letter Pp fun carried over into my classroom, as we began our study on the Letter Pp and Pumpkins!

    When I introduce  a new letter, I like to do art projects with  the actual letter. Here, we used the eraser tip of a pencil and paint to make a Polka Dotted Pp.

    Then I like to do an art project with something that begins with the letter sound. Here, I had the kids make a Pepperoni Pizza.  They had to find “pepperoni” circles that had the letter P on it and glue it to the “pizza” (bigger circle)

    To begin our study of Pumpkins, we created a web and wrote things that we knew about pumpkins and they   were all very excited to learn more!

    I spruced up my Science Center this past week and put different sized pumpkins in a basket for the munchkins to explore. 

They explored and compared the different sizes and a few of them even tried to measure the circumference of the pumpkins! I was impressed!

    We read the book “Plumpy Dumply Pumpkin” and explored different textures, which led us to create our own textured pumpkins, using art materials like feather, felt, glitter, buttons and sand paper. 

    They loved using silly words to describe what the objects felt like. My favorites: "Scritchy & Scratchy", hence the reason I had to use it in the display title!

    And the best part of our Pumpkin Exploration was when we opened up the pumpkin and took a look and a feel inside!

    Some of them were very excited to stick their hand inside and pull out some seeds, while others were just not very into this sensory experience- which  was okay with me! I absolutely LOVE the expressions on their faces when they felt the wet, squishy pumpkin guts!!!!

    Here are a few pics of my little one doing the exact same activity at home, right before Halloween!  What an awesome sensory experience!

    So, as you can obviously see, the Letter Pp sure became very popular these past few weeks!

    But I think Pumpkin Palooza is now in its final days! Time to move on...

Rainy days means more time for Pumpkin Palooza!!

   The weather here has been rainy, windy and cold. Yuck! But that's Fall weather right?

   Anyway, all the rain and cold has kept us inside and so, my little munchkin and I continued our Pumpkin Palooza fun!

   We made Pumpkin Playdoh. It’s a simple recipe that I use every time I make some fun type of play-doh!

1 cup water

1 cup flour

1/2 cup salt

1 tbsp oil

1 tbsp cream of tartar

red & yellow food coloring (enough of each to make orange)

pumpkin pie spice

               It's a delicious and fun way to play with playdoh! Smells great!

   We also did some craft foam pumpkin decorating. I wrote her first initial on the foam pumpkin, and found some black & white little rhinestone-like stickers at Michael’s (on clearance!). 

      I had her practice fine motor skills as she decorated her pumpkin with flashy rhinestones! 

Now we have a cute little pumpkin to put on our mantle!

        And now... it is November! That sure crept up on me fast!

"Pumpkin Palooza!"

    My thoughts and prayers go out to all those who have been directly affected by Hurricane Sandy. Here in Buffalo, we are feeling some effects, like rain and high winds. School closed today because of flooding and power outage concerns.

    So that gives me time to post a few things that my little munchkin and I have been doing.

    We have been having lots of fun with our own little “Pumpkin Palooza”!

    “Pumpkin Palooza” started last weekend, when we took a trip to the Great Pumpkin Farm! It turned out to be a perfect Pumpkin Picking Day!

      It was tons of fun and we ended coming home with quite a few pumpkins, in many different "small" sizes:
   Anyhow, on another note, I have been researching and learning about Five and Ten Frames and have been trying to find a way to introduce it with my little one and eventually, in my classroom.

To make things simple, I decided to begin with smaller concept of Five Frame.

    I created these Pumpkin Five Frame mats (and found the candy corn mats on TpT) to introduce my little munchkin to the concept. Of course I had to make it fun and used candy corn and candy pumpkins!

    I started by just having her counting candy pumpkins on each mat , then moved along to simple adding problems, such as “If you have 2 pumpkins and I gave you 3 more, how many would you have?” So we started with the math strip with 2 dots and I had her add 3 more pumpkins onto it and count the total.

 Then we moved on to Candy Corn Ten Frame. I found these mats in a Candy Corn Math unit (freebie), at Oceans of First Grade Fun. It’s geared towards 1^st grade, but very adaptable for lower grades too. Make sure to stop by and pick up a free copy and have some fun counting candy corn!

    The part she liked the best was when she was able to fill up the mats and then was able to eat them all up! (Well, not ALL of them!)

    

     And then we made Pumpkin Pudding!!

Ingredients:

One can of Canned Pumpkin (I used a little more than half of the can)

One Box of Vanilla Pudding

Cinnamon/Sugar

Vanilla wafers or even Graham Crackers

YUMMMMM!!  Deliciousness!