News for October 22

News for October 22

This week the morning and afternoon classes each had a special event. The morning class went to the gym to see a play called, "The Crab Prince", based on an Italian fairy tale. The afternoon class was visited by the Global TV crew. They filmed the students singing the "Falling Leaves" song and looking at leaves with magnifying glasses. (The tentative air date is October 27. I will post the date/time when I am told.)

The letters for this week were "D" and "P". The students learned the songs to help them remember the sounds that these letters make and used the wood pieces and chalkboards to create these letters.

The class talks about patterns everyday when we do the pattern on our calendar. The pattern for October is pumpkin-leaf-cat. Students began to do patterns on their own using unifix cubes. The children are getting very good at answering the question, "What comes next?" Some students in the afternoon class decided to take the cubes and make a tower. When it got too big, they asked if they could put it along the ground. They made a tower using all the cubes! A video showing this can be seen at the end of this posting.

The students had a chance to make large drawings on the ground outside using big pieces of chalk.

The children finished their class books for October. "Thanks for..." was made by having each child think about what they are thankful for in the world. These words were typed and the students glued the words, his/her photo and made a drawing to go with it. The details of this book and the other read aloud books can be found at our companion blog at:

http://planet5books.blogspot.com/.

The class had a lot of fun investigating the different ways to stack plastic cups. Some students chose to work alone and others worked as a team. Some children stacked them so that the tower was taller than they were!
After rereading the book, "Mud Puddle", the students showed their understanding of the story structure by acting out the story.

The class learned a new poem this week called, "Five Little Pumpkins". They also learned the actions to do when reciting the poem.

The children each made a pumpkin puppet this week. They used the skills they have been practising like, using a glue stick and using scissors, to help them do this craft.