Happy Halloween!

What a rainy, wet day here in South Florida! Here's what we did.....

Graphed our halloween costumes:

Read and colored "What will you be?"

They wrote in their journals about their costumes, but I forgot to get some pics (oops!)

Sang Witches Brew (By Hap Palmer) and Sequenced the ingredients on my witche's pot (the pictures are stuck on with velcro)

The kids all went home with goodie bags from yours truly.

Halloween Happenings

The week leading up to Halloween was BUSY!

On Monday we read "Where's My Mummy?" and sequenced the story.

Then we made baby mummy and sang Mummy Bingo.

On Tuesday we practiced retelling the story then did some character analysis activities.

We sang Bones Bingo, since Bones was another character in the story.

On Wednesday we made stained - glass candy corn and sang candy bingo. During Math we practiced ordinal numbers and higher order thinking skills with the characters from "Where's My Mummy?"

On Thursday we read about Frankenstein, made Frankenstein Glyphs (and graphed our data!) and sang Frank Bingo.

The kids loved these Bingo songs!

On Friday we had our Fall Festival. We started the Day with a Brown Bear type book themed to halloween called "Black cat, Black cat, what do you see?

After fine arts the kids had fun rotating to the 6 K teachers to do fun activities.

Tissue Paper Pumpkins with Ms. Burnett -

Halloween Movie with Mrs. Curry -

Making Witches with Mrs. Purtell -

Halloween Dances with Mrs. Gill -

Monster Musical Chairs with Ms. Norman -

and Sorting/Graphing Boo- Mallows with Me!

Books we loved this week:

Where's My Mummy Unit,  Black Cat book, and Free Frankie Downloads from Deanna Jump. Halloween Boo-Mallow sorting and graphing from Frogs, Bees and Under the Seas.

Centers Part 2

Here is how I organize my centers:
Each student is assigned to a group on our work board, either red, yellow, green or blue:

Within their group they have a partner (or two) with whom they work. Each row is a partnership.

Next to their names is the centers they will go to. There are four pictures next to their names for center 1, 2, 3, and 4.

During the first rotation the red group comes to the guided reading table and everyone else goes to their center under number1.

Each center is labelled with a picture that corresponds to the picture on the board so everyone remembers where to go.

After 15 minutes we clean up and get ready to rotate. Everyone goes to the center located under number 2 next to their name. This continues for rotations 3 and 4.

This picture shows what my room looks like during centers, with students working in different areas:

Also next to each partner group at the end of the row is their math center for the day. These are the numbers under M for math.

Each group goes to one center Mondays & Wednesday and we rotate the centers until everyone has had a turn. Then I switch out the activities in the centers. The math bins 1-5 are labelled with corresponding number pictures.

The table where they do that bucket is labelled with a matching picture so they know where to sit:

 And the shelf also has the same matching picture so they know where to put the bucket back.

Center 6 is the computer, and 7&8 come to the teacher table.

I know there are many, many great ways to do centers. This is the way the majority of the teachers at my school were doing centers when I started there 6 years ago, so this is how I do them too!

Our Schedule

Here is what a day in 4-106 looks like....

7:50 The bell rings and I pick up the kids from the hallway

7:50 - 8:00 Students enter and hang up their book bags. They put their folders and agendas in the buckets and pick up their morning work to take to their seats.

8:00 - 8:25 Morning announcements over the TV and doing our morning work.

students slowly trickle in during this time

8:25 - 8:30 Students take their calendar folders to their seat on the carpet then line up for Fine Arts

8:30 - 9:15 Fine Arts
Day 1 Strings

Day 2 PE

Day 3 Art

Day 4 Music

Day 5 Media Center

9:15 - 9:30 Calendar Time, as I fill in our class calendar the students fill in their copies in their folders. We also track the weather, birthdays, lost teeth, practice math skills, sight words, and tallies. We keep track of how many days we've been in school as well. More on my Calendar Folders HERE.

9:30 - 10:00 Whole group reading time - Weekly story & comprehension, phonics work, sight word songs, games focusing on our reading skills

10:00 - 11:15 Learning Centers. Students go to three centers and my reading table. We do learning centers Monday - Thursday. On Friday we do something special for our weekly theme. More on Centers HERE.

11:15 - 11:20 Clean up centers and wash hands for lunch

11:20 - 11:25 Walk to Lunch

11:25 - 11:55 Lunch

12:00 - 12:30 Math - We start each math lesson with our Heidi Songs cd singing songs for the skills we are working on. We then have a guided lesson to practice our skill followed by independent practice in our math workbooks. We use GO Math Florida.

Then, on Tuesdays and Thursdays we work on problem solving skills in our math journals.

Monday, and Wednesdays we do math centers.

 Fridays we do something fun for our letter or theme like Skittles sorting and graphing for Ss:

Also, on fine arts day 2, we get computer lab time during our math block:

12:30 - 1:00 Science/Social Studies -
Monday/Wednesday We do Science. We start with a guided lesson and then do some kind of follow up activity. This week we learned about how healthy foods give our bodies energy and our brains thinking power. We sorted healthy/unhealthy foods (pictures cut from magazines) and then made our own MyPlates from the governments health website.

Tuesday/Thursday we do Social Studies. Again, we start with a lesson from our big book in which we learn a new concept and vocabulary is introduced. This week we learned about position words and using them to describe where something is. Then we do some kind of practice whether it be a workbook page or a project. This week we made pumpkin position books:

Fridays we do a science experiment that correlates with our theme like this fun spider/prey experiment:

1:00 - 1:30 Recess (Outside or Inside using Adventuretofitness.tv if it's raining)

1:30 - 2:00 Writing - Some days this is a mini-lesson focused on a skill (such as illustrating, labelling, sounding out words) and then story writing time, other days we do journal writing with a prompt. On Fridays we do Show and Tell during this time.

2:00 - 2:15 Clean up and Pack up

2:15 Dismissal