Monday, October 29, 2012

Fire Safety, Pumpkins & Hurrication 2012

Hello friends! I hope you are all staying safe as Hurricane Sandy makes its way toward land.

School is closed tomorrow, 10/30, also.

To help teach your child about hurricanes and make them feel more safe,

you can click here to visit Sesame Street's Hurricane Toolkit.

This past week, we discussed Fire Safety and Maps in Social Studies. An engine from the local fire station tried to visit us, but unfortunately got called away within minutes after arriving. You can see the students waving goodbye. (I feel like this may have been a better experience for them than simply walking through the fire truck? I explained to the kiddos that the firemen were going to help save people and we got to see them in action! They were excited to know that they were leaving us to help others in need.) We made a map of our classroom and students had to locate their seat on the map. Most of the students did this with no trouble at all; they have excellent spatial awareness this year!

In Language Arts, we focused on the letter R. To connect this with math topics, we made a rocket to help us count backwards from 10-0 and graphed using Rainbow Goldfish. If your child didn't have any writing on his/her graph, it means he/she did it perfectly! You may have noticed happy and sad faces near some of the graph columns. Students are asked to put a happy face next to the item they have the MOST of and a sad face next to the item they have the LEAST of. If there is a tie for most or least, they will have multiple happy or sad faces.

FIRE SAFETY

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Showing off our fire chief hats!

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Thank you cards for the firemen!

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Waving good-bye to the firemen and the handprint activity we did to follow-up the quick visit.


RAINBOW FISH GRAPH

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COUNTDOWN ROCKET

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Math Work Station #7: Counting & Number Recognition

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At this station, students work together to match cards with numerals to cards with the corresponding number of dots or objects. They can then put them in correct number order going forward or backward.

Math Work Station #8: Shapes 1

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The first shapes station is actually tangram puzzles. Students choose a puzzle card and manipulate their seven tangram pieces until they match the card.

Math Work Station #9: Shapes 2

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The second shapes station uses similar puzzle cards with attribute blocks instead of tangrams. This is more difficult as there are more pieces, but there can be multiple answers to the same puzzle. Students still have to manipulate their shapes to fit the puzzle.

Math Work Station #10: Cubes

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Here, students work with unifix cubes and puzzle cards to make things like robots or boats out of various colors of cubes. Students have to count how many of each color cube they need and place them on the card according to the cubes shown in the picture.


We also conducted a Pumpkin Investigation on Friday! Working with the students in Mrs. Smith's class, all of the kinders got to see the pumpkin, guess how many seeds were inside of it, feel the inside of the pumpkin and vote on how they wanted me to carve it. I love that all the students agreed it was a BIG pumpkin, but when I asked for a BIG number for the guess of how many seeds were inside the pumpkin, I got the following guesses: 9, 8, 30 and 40. "Big" numbers. When we are back at school, students will get a chance to taste the pumpkin seeds I took home to roast.

PUMPKIN INVESTIGATION

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Feeling the slimy inside of the pumpkin!

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Carving the pumpkin and watching it glow (from a flashlight)!

Enjoy the rest of your day today and tomorrow off! I hope you all have plans and an emergency supply kit in place should the weather get worse. Remember if the lights go out there are still crafts you can do, board games you can play or books you can read via candlelight! Owl be teaching you more tomorrow!


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