The Big Red Barn

October was a great month, filled with so many exciting things.  Here are a few pictures of what our classroom has been up to lately.

Like most woman I know, I am obsessed with Target.  It's definitely a weakness. It doesn't matter what day it is, I can walk in there looking for toothpaste and walk out with 100 more things (and an empty wallet - but that's besides the point)!

One of the things I love about Target is their dollar section.  One of my teaching partners and I hit up the dollar section at Target recently.  We decided to share and trade some of the gizmo's and gadgets that we found.  I decided to hide some of the items in our classroom's rice table.  I told the class that I buried a Halloween treasure for them to find.  They were excited to find pumpkins, ghosts and spiders inside.

During our pretend play time, a few students re-created a grocery store scene.  Liliana was the cashier, Madison was bagging the items on the conveyor belt and Gabe was a dad pretending to shop for groceries.  I love their creativity and ability to work together.

We continue to work on making predictions, connections and retelling what stories are about. This week I read the story, The Three Little Pigs to the students and we re-created the story using these paper puppets.  The kids did a great job retelling what happened in the story by changing their voice, using facial expression, and body gestures.

Julia is pretending to be the big bad wolf.

We continue to work on writing our first and last names and knowing our personal information (parents' names, phone number, birthday, etc.)  This week we rainbow-traced our first and last names and our phone numbers.  We also learned that everyone's phone number is different depending upon what type of phone they have and where they live.

We began our writing workshop a few weeks ago but this week I really started to see some of the students make huge gains.  We practiced writing sentences on our chalkboards and learned that authors write books.  We have been practicing being authors in our classroom. So far, we learned that authors follow these steps for writing:

1- Think about what you want to write about

2- Say the story aloud

3- Sketch your picture

4- Label your picture

5 - Write the words

We also learned that we should not give up when we come to a word that we don't know how to write. We never give up! We simply say the word slowly and write the letter sounds we hear.  This is definitely a skill we continue to work on but I am so proud of the progress that the kids are making.

This is a sample of one of the stories Julia wrote about.  As you can see, she is doing an awesome job!

Milaya decided to write about the pumpkin patch, as well.  I love the level of thought behind her story.  She wrote about the pumpkins and gourds they picked and she even told us about the wagon ride. Amazing!

I stole this activity from my teaching partner, Jen.  We have been working on beginning sounds and rhyming so we sang this together.  I changed the beginning sounds and rhymes with post-its several times (ex: it starts with 'f' and rhymes with 'charmer'... what do you think it could be? farmer!) and the students loved it.  I suppose it helps that my students live in Zeeland - we all have a little schema about farms and what lives on a farm! :)