{Fall at the ECDC}

It's been very busy over the past few months, so I haven't posted in a while, but I wanted to give you all a peek at the fun we had in October and November in Pre-K! We started by reading some fantastic scarecrow books:

During math workshop we worked with our turn and talk partners to create a scarecrow out of shapes. We counted how many of each shape we used and compared them with other groups.

 We read this fun story...

 

 After reading the story we put our critical thinking skills to use and thought about problems and solutions. We are all about solving problems in Pre-K! :)

 Next, we broke into groups and worked together to make a cooperative scarecrow! Each group worked on one part of him, and then we assembled the parts and hung him up in our classroom.

We even made some crows and corn for our sweet scarecrow to keep him company!

Ms. Leslie had a fantastic idea to paint some fall leaves with tools from outdoors: pine needles! It was a gorgeous day and the peas loved doing art outside with Ms. Leslie.

 

 Over the next few weeks we discussed apples and pumpkins. First, we talked about apples. We peeled, cored and sliced apples we brought to school with a very cool contraption. Then we made our own applesauce! It was seriously delicious. You can check out the recipe here.

When we talked about pumpkins we had a pumpkin morning message where everyone decorated a jack o' lantern.

 

We also added jack o' lanterns to blocks which inspired some fun play.

 

We decided to make our own jack o' lantern. We learned how to use tally marks to take a vote and voted on how we wanted our jack o' lantern's face to look!

Next we read my all time favorite book:

We decided to make our pumpkin a "Pumpkin Jack" and when he started wilting and becoming wrinkly we added him to the compost pile. We have been keeping track of his decomposition. This is what he looks like now:

 

Gross! But also...cool.

Our little pumpkins painted pumpkins. :)

We also learned about our 5 senses and did some fun activities about our senses. We had a sweet, salty, sour and bitter taste test.

And we made mystery egg shakers and smelly boxes to explore.

During our writing time, we popped popcorn and wrote words that described the popcorn. Yum!

Before thanksgiving we did a lot of Turkey talk! We made turkeys in our journals:

Then we read one of my favorites. Here's a video of it....it's totally worth it!

We made turkeys at art with disguises to they wouldn't be eaten on Thanksgiving!!!

We also made a canoe with some Native Americans that we put in numerical order 1-10. We've been discussing 10 a lot lately. You can see more about it in my next post! Look at this concentration below!!

Well that wraps up a small fraction of the fun and learning we did over the last several months. Be looking for an upcoming post about math!

 Happy Hump Day!



{Red Ribbon Week} & {The Cornfield Crew}

Every year we have a door decorating contest for Red Ribbon Week and we get pretty excited about it around here! We also can win money for our classrooms which is a pretty big deal for teachers. :) Pre-K 2's door was entirely made by the children this year! They did a cooperative project to build the scarecrow for the door.

They pieced him together...

And voila! They won Facebook Choice Award this year! Congrats Pre-K 2!

Our door was a dracula theme! I made the peas into mini counts and they made bats and wrote numbers counting down from 19. I think it turned out pretty stinkin cute! We got 2nd place!

 Love these counts!

And Pre-K written numbers. :)

Here's some more creative doors.



One of my buddies did this door! She is always super creative!

This door won 1st place, it was adorable!

Next, Pre-K made corn at art.

 They used bubble wrap to make the kernal patterns.

 It got kinda messy!

The final product was pretty cute!

 In Pre-K 1 we started the week by shopping catalogs to decide what we will spend our money on. Every year the peas get to make choices about what our classroom needs and in November we will rally and campaign for the item we think will be used in the best way. Then we vote! They took a number chart with 75 circled so they could remember how much they have to spend.

 We did scarecrow journals!

 We did some more phonetic writing this week.

 "They scare away crows." I LOVE THIS!

 We read this story: 

And then we did a story map about it.

In math, we patterned with corn. Ms. Rhonda showed the kids the pretty patterns in Indian corn, then we made our own patterns. 

 Pre-K 2 also put out these fun sensory trays!

 

 We enjoyed the trays, but there might still be traces of corn laying around our room, haha!

 We read about corn, brainstormed some questions and answered them.

 And what else to do next, but to taste some corn products? We had corn tortillas and of course, popcorn!

Both classes made scarecrows, Pre-K 2 started with these super cute paper bag scarecrows.

 They laid them out to dry....

 And then stuffed them.

 Then they were added to the cornfield!

 Pre-K 1 made shape scarecrows.

 I wouldn't mind having a couple of these out in my cornfield.

We have continued our daily work and now everyone does it pretty independantly in the mornings.

 

Pre-K 1 did some sight word games in literacy. We wrote our sight words on Doodle Buddy, then stamped over them with Halloween stamps. 

All week, we had super fun dress days for Red Ribbon Week. Here's a few pictures of our special dress days:

 

Mixed-Match day may have been my favorite! 

 

 And that cowboy on the right below? He's just demonstrating how cowboys sleep. Standing up. Ha!

This week we have already been busy, busy, busy with pumpkins and Halloween preperations and pumpkin contests. My favorite month has almost come to and end, but it has been a whirlwind of fun and silliness! Happy hump day!