October 24-28, 2016

We had a great week this week!  We did so much, and are REALLY looking forward to Monday, and Trick or Treating.

We set up this lovely invitation, with writing materials, books, pumpkins to inspect, pumpkin seeds, a book about the pumpkin life cycle, a magnifying glass and some little acrylic pumpkins to play with.  Imagine all the literacy and conversational opportunities that go along with a simple setup like this.  We can add to it based on the conversations we have with our friends, so it's a living representation of what our class is interested in.

We did some measuring this week, we measured how tall our pumpkins are...

 

We weighed them (with counting bears on the other side of the balance)...

 

 

We measured how big around the pumpkins are with yarn...

 

We found out if pumpkins sink or float...

 

 

We explored the inside of a couple of pumpkins.  How does it smell?

 

 

 

 How does it feel?

 

How does it look?

 

 

We finally carved it...

 

 

One of our goals is to always make learning visible.  Because of this, we have many different ways to document the learning that happens in our classroom.  One way that I love is to make a portfolio of each child's work for a LIMITED AMOUNT OF TIME, that they can take home and show to mom and dad (and everyone else who will look).  We did this with our pumpkin investigations and it looks like this...  

On the back is some artwork that each child did with or about pumpkins.  Representing what we know is really showing what we have learned.

 

 

(Sorry it's sideways, I tried to fix it several times and there's only so much time I'm going to spend on something like that.)

 

 







Turkey Class Books

Another class book, this one made up by the children in my class.  They are AUTHORS!

 

The Very Hungry Caterpillar (as told by my preschool class)

 

 

Our class LOVES to make books. Little ones, big ones, whole class ones, ABC books, any kind of books.

 

One day we noticed a bunch of caterpillars on our playground and brought a couple in to live for a while.  After reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, I noticed that some of my friends were drawing pictures of the caterpillar and various illustrations from the book.  The rule in our classroom is that if the children are interested in something, we're going with it.  So we discussed (as we always do when we read) the author and illustrator and what each of them do.  I asked if they would like to be authors and illustrators, and they wrote the words the way they remembered them and drew the pictures based on the book.

 

 

This type of activity supports VPK standards and school readiness because they are practicing retelling familiar stories, using fine motor skills while writing, thinking about and planning what they wanted to write about, forming letters and learning from each other.  They are very proud of this book!