Week of November 5-8, 2012

Week of November 5-8, 2012

Theme: 5 Senses (smell & taste)

Letter: U

 

The Halloween party was fun for the children and successful. We were able to go trick or treating throughout the school building and paraded through several classrooms so that the other grade levels could see the children's costumes. We played a pumpkin beanbag toss game, played a decorate the pumpkin game on the IPad and played Halloween darts. We made a Frankenstein as well as a spider in a spiderweb. We also had the opportunity to carve pumpking. We used a string to measure how round our pumpkins were and then used a yard stick to find out how long our string was. We also estimated the number of seeds that would be inside the pumpkin. The a.m. class had 374 seeds in their pumpkin and the p.m. class had 278 seeds, most of the student guesses were in the 20's, they were amazed when we counted them how many there really were. The a.m. class seemed more adventurous as far as putting their hands inside of the pumpkin the children in the p.m. class were not very excited about how the inside of the pumpkin felt so I had fewer volunteers in that class.

Next week we will begin exploring the 5 senses. We will start with the senses of smell and taste. We are going to read a story called, "Little Pea." In the story Little Pea has to eat his five helping of candy before he can eat his dessert, fruits and vegetables. We will follow the story by exploring the tastes of different fruits and vegetables and charting which ones we liked and which ones we didn't like. We will also be playing a game for the sense of smell. We will have six different smells for the children to smell and they will have to identify the smell from the pictures that are given. 

Next week's letter is the letter U so we are going to explore the concept of under. We are going to go for a U hunt and look for the letter u's that are hidden under things in the classroom. You can play this game at home hiding different objects under things and then having your child find them and identify what they are. We are also going to be talking about animals that hibernate underground and we will make a craft with pictures of animals that live underground.

On Monday we are having an Author Assembly at school in the a.m. so we are going to attend this event with our Third Grade Buddies. In the p.m. we are going to the computer lab with our Third Grade Buddies to play some preschool games. This Wednesday is our first Parent Reader day. If you did not get a November calendar with a scheduled day on it and you volunteered to come in and read don't worry I will be adding you to the next month's calendar.

Just a reminder that school starts at 8:30 and 12:00. It is important that your child arrive on time because we start classroom activities promptly, and this can be very unsettling for your child to arrive in the middle of an activity. If there is a day or time you will be picking your child up from school and they typically ride the bus please be sure to send in a note with your child or send an email. If we do not have the note or email we will assume that they are going home on the bus. I hope everyone who lost power during the storm will have it restored soon so that you may resume your daily routines.