Mrs. Garrabrant's Classroom: Pumpkins, Leaf Hunt & Mo Willems

I brought in some pumpkins and set them out to see if the students were interested in them and might want to learn about them. I brought in many different shapes, colors and sizes of pumpkins and gourds. They have really enjoyed observing and looking closer at the details of the pumpkins.

They especially loved looking at and feeling the "warts" on this pumpkin!

They documented what they saw by tracing the pumpkins or drawing them free hand. They looked closely and made sure to add the appropriate details.

In guided reading this week we started reading some basic books that focus on the letters that we have been learning. We also did sorting activities to decide which beginning sound different pictures had. We have started to work on reading strategies to help us figure our unknown words such as: using our finger to point and keep our place when reading, look at the picture, look at the first letter, and look at the last letter.

We documented in our exploration journals when we made our green lemonade last week. we practiced writing our color sight words and sounding out the words lemonade and ice cube.

After we learned our yellow color word song, we were able to take home our book in order to be able to practice the song at home!

Here are the friends who shared their treasure block this week. We learned how to spell their names and practiced signing it with sign language. We then created their web from things that are important to them. These details helped us create our illustrations and stories for that child's book they got to take home.

Soleil

Kaylee

Madison

Alyssa

Braxton

We took advantage of the nice weather on Thursday and went on a leaf hunt. We observed how our surroundings were changing now that fall has come. Each student collected leafs of many different colors and shapes.

We saw some trees with all green leaves. Some had leaves with many colors. Some had most of their leaves and some had many leaves already falling off. So many changes!

This tree had one random branch that was red in all the green and it was beautiful!

Group pictures with their favorite leaves.

The next day, the students chose their favorite leaves and documented them in their exploration journal. We taped the leaf on the page next to their documentation in order to see how they compare.

The students also created pencil drawings of their leaves. We will be painting these with water colors and I can't wait to see how awesome they turn out!

The students then began to bring us leaves they were finding on the playground wanting to share how they were changing as well!

After a lot of hard work, our birthday chart is finally up! We don't have any friends with their birthday in March! The students were happy to see our chart up!

We finished our red color mosaic and hung it up with our label!

We began working on our yellow mosaic.

We finished our F & P letter cards for our word wall. Their illustrations are getting so much more detailed!

We began our author study on Mo Willems. We read a lot of his books and watched a lot of videos about him. We figured out what the kids wanted to learn about him and we will be answering those questions this week. We will be creating drawings of his characters to display at literacy night on Thursday. We hope to see you there!

Here are some of the videos we watched. We found animated versions of a lot of his books. We also found some different versions of Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus such as Don't Let the Pigeon Touch the Books and Don't Let the Pigeon be the Principal. You can search these on YouTube if you are interested in watching them as well.