Rudolph With Your Nose SO Bright!!

This bulletin board is definitely my favorite one of the entire year!!  I got the idea from my incredibly talented and creative friend, Erin. :)  This board is so easy, but the students remember it year after year!! Simply buy a strand of the red lights.  I like to use the bigger bulb lights.  I bought mine at Lowe's.  Tape the strand to the bulletin board.  Next, make any Rudolph craft that you have, but cut out a circle for the nose.  Staple the Rudolph face onto the bulletin board around the red light!  They are so fun! :)

We are Thankful

We have been so busy in Mrs. Patton's classroom!  We started the month by learning about facts from the first Thanksgiving.  

The students also participated in a "Disguise a Turkey"  project.  They did a great job!!!  The turkey below holds a special place in my heart.....this student disguised his turkey as my husband, Joe.  Hahaha!!  He did not tell me he was doing this, so it came as a complete surprise!!  Joe loves to hunt, as you can see!!  This still just makes me laugh! :)

We concluded the month by thinking about what WE are Thankful for.  The students all concurred that we are very thankful for our family and friends, and the men and women who serve in the armed forces!  One of the students in our class has a cousin who is currently serving in Afghanistan.  We made him the letters below, and we are so hoping they arrive for Christmas!  

We WANT YOU! To get out and VOTE!!

What  a fun day we have had getting ready for Election day tomorrow!!  We made Uncle Sam hats to help us as we worked on Election Vocabulary, ABC order and syllables!!  Mrs. Patton's class is excited about tomorrow!!  :)  

Click Here for more Election Day fun!  

Fall Party!

This week we had Parent Teacher Conferences, which were followed by Fall Break! What a nice little break to have before the fun and crazy holiday seasons begin!! Before the break, our room mothers were kind enough to organize a fun fall party for the kids. As you can see, everyone had a great time!:) Thank you, room moms!!!

Science ROCKS! :)

We LOVE science in Mrs. Patton's class!!! As a STEM school this year, we have access to a lot of new and fun technology! In Science, we are working on the scientific method, the scientific design process and simple machines. This week we started Lego robotics to put our learning into action!!! I have been amazed by what these students can do!! In this video you will see several different design projects, as well as our Lego project!



Click HERE:
Check out our what we are doing in Science class!!!

It's Pumpkin Time!!!

We are busy working in our classroom!!! This week in Readers' Workshop we continue to work on Comparing and Contrasting using Pumpkin Books.  The books Pumpkin Circle, Pumpkin Town and Ready for Pumpkins are some of our favorites thus far!

Comparing and Contrasting have worked really well with these books because there are a number of similarities and differences.  We started with Pumpkin Circle, and used a KWL chart to activate our schema.  

Pumpkin Circle is also stocked full of WONDERFUL descriptive words, so it was a perfect time to discuss adjectives. 

Each student listened for descriptive adjectives as we read Pumpkin Circle, and then recorded the words on our giant class poster!



Finally, Literacy Stations this week have a pumpkin theme.  We are working on Prefixes, Synonyms/Antonyms and sorting Nouns/Verbs and Adverbs!!










All of these games are part of my Pumpkin Pack pictured below!






Click here to purchase a copy of these games!




Parents in my class, please email me for a copy to practice at home with your child!  :)  Have a wonderful Friday!!

Batter Up!!! It's Time for Baseball in October!

We all love baseball!  Especially when the World Series is just around the corner!!  We are celebrating this great sport and gearing up for the World Series with our Math Stations this week.  The students continue to practice writing numbers in different forms, decipher between even and odd numbers and counting money.  Station work has been a lot of fun!  

In the "Batter UP!" station, students practice writing numbers in different forms.

The students wrote numbers in different forms and glued them to either the even or odd number glove.  

At the "What a Catch" station, students work on greater than less than, even/odd and basic number sense skills.




All of the stations are part of my Unit below! If you are interested in purchasing this Unit, please click here. Parents in my classroom, please email me and I will be happy to send you copies so you can practice these games at home!!  :)

Using Mimio Votes!!

We love the Mimio votes!! Today we took a quick math assessment. The students used paper to work out the problem and then answer the problem with a Mimio vote. The answers are automatically graded and the answers are graphed. The students can quickly see and understand their areas of strengths and weakness. The Mimio vote makes taking a quiz fun!!!

Understanding Characters!!

This week in Reader's Workshop, we are continuing our study of characterization.  We want to understand how characters think, feel and change during a story.  This will help us understand what we read. Below are a few examples of what we are working on during class!  

Our goal is to understand what a character looks like on the inside and the outside.  Before writing about characters in a book, we wrote about ourselves!

Reader's Workshop focus wall!

We studied many characters in our favorite stories, including Molly Lou Melon, and Camilla Cream from "A Bad Case of Stripes". We focused on what the characters looked like on the inside and the outside.  

Today, our focus was about how characters change in a story.  We read about "Lilly" from "Julius, The Baby of the World" by Kevin Henkes

The students filled out a response sheet about how their characters changed during the course of  their reading. 

How Do Spiders Eat Their Prey?

In Science, we are working on the scientific method. Our Researcher of the Week presented a science experiment to the class that demonstrated how a spider uses venom to liquefy its venom and eat its prey...yikes! :) To show this experiment, each student placed a sugar cube in a cup to signify a spider stuck in a web. Then, they put some water in the cup to act as the venom. The students watched the sugar cube dissolve and then drank the sugar water with a straw, simulating how a spider drinks its prey. During the experiment, each child filled out papers documenting each part of the scientific method. Some of the "spiders" in our class enjoyed their sugar water better than others:)