Bats!

This week we had some pre-Halloween fun and did activities with bats.  The kids enjoyed reading this informational book about bats.  We talked about how to listen for facts while reading. 

We met "Lips the Fish" this week.  He is one of our reading strategy animals who helps us to remember to look at the beginning sound.  I had some of the words in the bat book covered, except for the first letter, and we practiced getting our lips ready and saying the beginning sound. 

After reading our book, we did some informational writing about things we learned about bats. 

I also introduced the concept of a word family since we have been working on rhyming words.  We started with the -at family and learned words that ended with the -at sound.

We sorted pictures into groups if they had the -at sound or not.  And we also found -at sounds in a little book we got to take home.

We finished learning all of the vowel sounds, (for the first time), this week.  The kids had a great time making these vowel flip charts!  We learned that vowels are special and are like glue because they stick the other letters together to make words.  And we learned they are unique because they all get to make 2 sounds.

In math we worked on writing number sentences to go with story problems.

The kids used story mats and cubes to show what was happening in the math problem.  Then they recorded a number sentence to go along with their work.

 We also played a game to work on the +1 pattern.

And used spider rings to make some +1 number sentences.

Ivory's mom is our Great Artist volunteer this year!  We are so lucky to have her helping our class learn about artists and art techniques.  We will get to do a special project like this about once a month. 

This time around we learned about Joan Miro's painting, "The Singing Fish."  You should have seen a reproduction of this painting come home last week!

The kids did a great job and had fun using "mixed media" to create their own works of art.

We had a great time wearing our jammies to school on Friday!

We also did some fun Halloween-themed exercise to Halloween music for PE.  We flew like bats, floated like ghosts, crawled like spiders, and here we are rolling like pumpkins. 

We had a special activity on Friday afternoon and go to go to "SPOOKFEST," put on by our principal and assistant principal.

The kids got to listen to some fun Halloween stories and got a little pencil topper too!

We had lots of special friends this week.  John enjoyed telling us about his memories and the kids all laughed when he showed them his whoopee cushion.

Evelyn turned 6 and shared some yummy cookies with our class.

John and Olivia were selected as students of the month for showing respect in our classroom!  They each got a certificate with some fun coupons attached.

Mr. Hansen, our principal, presented their awards to them.

And then they had to take some silly pictures.  :)  Great work guys!  Thanks for being so good in class!