Candy Corn Pictures

Today we started the chapter book, The Candy Corn Contest. The teacher in the book brings in a jar filled with candy corn, and the kids are to try and guess how many candy corns are in the jar. As we read the first half of the book today, we ate candy corn and peanut butter kisses (I was surprised how many kids liked the peanut butter kisses!). As we were reading, I came up with the idea to have the kids make Halloween / spooky pictures using candy corn. Here are some of the pictures the kids made. I thought they all turned out neat. :)

Noah - Nice Halloween person

Matthew T. - Cool Bat!

Sydney - I like her two trick-or-treaters

Chloe - Spooky Ghosts

Angelina - Smiley Jack-O-Lantern

Allie - More "Booooorrific" Ghosts

Scary Stories

Today we wrote scary stories. We started out by looking at the picture of the haunted house. Then we brainstormed words that they might use in writing a scary story about the house. Next, I wrote a scary story of my own as an example. Finally they wrote their own scary story. Many of them sound the same because they took some ideas from my story. Everyone did an EXCELLENT job on their story! These are a sampling of some of the stories that were written.

Scary Monster Faces

To go along with our scary stories, the kids made scary monster faces. Here are some of the faces they made. :)

Megan's face is so cool! I love her month the best! It's VERY creepy!

This is Ryan's out of this world alien face! Nice job!

Matthew K. did an AWESOME job on his werewolf face!

Gabby's face is the "cat's meow"! It is purrrfect! ;)

Emma's mummy face is a "wrap"! She worked very hard on it!

Evan's monster face took a lot of time and has a lot of details. Nice face monster man!

Corie's monster face has creepy eyes! It's monsterific! :)

Bat's at the Children's Museum

Over fall break I was able to see a really cool program at the Children's Museum! It was on bats. They said that they do it every year, so if you remember it next year, you should ask your parents if they could take you. They talked about bats and brought 4 different kinds of bats to show us. They also walked around the room so that everyone could see them close up! They brought 2 small bats and 2 large bats. The two small bats were the dog face bat and the little brown bat (I think). The large bats were both fruit bats. One was the same kind of fruit bat that the book Stellaluna was written about. The other bat was the largest kind of bat there is, a Malaysian fruit bat. It was really cool and big. I think that they said that its wing spand is 5 feet. That means that when their wings are completely spread out, the length from wing tip to wing tip would be 5 feet! That is taller than most of you!!!!

I hope you enjoy the pictures! :)

Look...It's Stellaluna! :O)

This is the Mayalasian fruit bat...the largest kind of bat!
Aren't its feet cool. They really do look like our hands! The lady just walked around with the bat hanging from her arm like a purse. Her 2 daughters that were in 2nd and 3rd grade were there helping her.

Candy Probability

This week we are learning about probability. On Monday we discussed the concepts of certain, impossible, possible, likely, and unlikely, and how they relate to probability. On Tuesday we did 2 probability activities. The first activity had to do with candy and the second activity had to do with socks. Obviously the kids liked the candy activity the best! :) The students were divided into 6 groups of 3. Each group was given a brown bag with 10 colored candies in it. There were 6 orange candies (some groups had red because there wasn't enough oranges to go around), 3 purple candies and 1 white candy. They took turns pulling candy out of the bag and had a data sheet that they were to use tally marks on to keep track of the colors they pulled. They did this 20 - 30 times. In the end, they were to see that the orange/red colored candies were picked the most and the white candy was picked least. Unfortunately, some groups tally charts didn't follow this rationale. But this lead into a discussion that this was just a small sampling, and that if you were to do this 100 or 200 times, you would have had a more accurate outcome. Everyone had fun with the activity, and it was a great opportunity for me to take some pictures of the class too! :)

Star Spelling and Star Handwriting 9-25-08

Star Spelling
Claire
Allie
Chloe
Emma
Tyler
Matthew T.
Cameron

Star Handwriting
Allie
Chloe
Sydney
Megan
Corie
Emma
Evan
Matthew T.

100% on Dictation
(this doesn't happen a lot)
Allie

Grandparent's Breakfast

It was so nice to meet some of your grandparent today! Here are some pictures from this morning.