October Learning

Pick, Pick, Pick A Fat Pumpkin!! 

(Tune of "Skip To My Lou")

Pick, pick, pick a fat pumpkin.

Pick, pick, pick a fat pumpkin.

Pick, pick, pick a fat pumpkin.

October brings the harvest!

Tomatoes, corn and apples too.

We'll have a feast when we are through.

Now I'm hungry, how about you?

October brings the harvest!

A perfectly pumpkin-filled day at Graham's Market last Monday.

*The children have been enjoying this song all month long.  It has been such a great time enjoying the harvest of October.  Our garden is thriving with herbs and veggies.  We have studied all sorts of other fruits and vegetables as well.  

Apple Cider and Popcorn! Yum....Thanks Graham's Market!

Yummy new fruits and veggies to taste.  Each child chose a special fruit or veggie from Graham's Market to bring back to school and share with friends. We had a picnic outside on our new porch. Some exciting tasty treats included dragon fruit and apple bananas from Hawaii. It was fun to study the different sizes, shapes and seeds of fruits we love and fruits that were new to us.

Our School Garden!

Changing leaves and a few cool breezes have warmed our hearts and October's magic will be all a glow this Wednesday (8:30 am) with a Halloween parade of ghosties and ghouls and a fall festival. 
Looking forward to seeing you there!
Until then....

Please enjoy these pictures of fun in learning during the fall days of JK.

Bye Bye October....Hello November!

This Thursday we will begin a study of Florida's early people, the Seminole.

Apples, apples, apples!

How do plants drink water?  Celery study!

colorful water + celery stalks with multiple "shoots" that suck up liquid like a straw  = Colorful learning that  gets a beautiful response.

Pumpkins, pumpkins, pumpkins!

 Our class pumpkin gives back to our garden. The children watched the complete lifecycle of a pumpkin, drawing and dictating about what they saw.

Using pattern blocks to create jack-o-lantern faces and practice the fine motor skill of tracing.  Partners later practiced the skill of creating symmetry with one child beginning a face on one side of the pumpkin and the other finishing it to match on the other side.

The children graphed the shapes they used for eyes, noses and mouths to create their jack-o-lanterns then counted up how many of their friends chose the same pieces.

A little boo-tiful bowling game! Have you ever bowled with a pumpkin?? The children were all smiles while enjoying this funtastic game!

Hammering buttons onto pumpkins! What a happy Halloween fine motor activity this was! Yes, they used real nails and hammers to get those colorful buttons to stay.

The children wrote and illustrated their own Halloween pumpkin stories.

What a colorful way to study reactions to the elements.  The children learned a lot about how the sun and it's heat effects pumpkins during their time of growth, and after they are harvested and hollowed out.  But this experiment took heat and it's effects on this pumpkin to a whole new colorful level.  The children peeled and helped glue crayons to the top of a pumpkin.  Later, when they applied heat to the crayons they watched them change in a most delightful way. Just watch!

Dates to remember!

October 31 - Halloween parade 8:20 and Fall Festival 10:00

November 8 - Poetry in the Park 8:30

November 16 - Exploring and Feast for Children- We need help at exploring and to plate the food.

November 19 - 23 Thanksgiving Vacation

Growing and Learning

  It was a week of apple-icious learning and fun!

The children were very excited to bring in and share their different apples last week.  We began our apple study by asking each child to draw a picture of the apples that he/she brought to school. Once the pictures were finished we gathered together on the carpet and sorted our apples as a group, by color.  We discovered that we had five red apples, two green, and three yellow.  After adding each group together, the children enthusiastically announced that we had 10 apples.  

BUT THERE WERE MORE!

Some of the apples were red and green or red and yellow.  They had to be sorted into their own pile.  The children decided to call them multicolored.  Together, we counted 14 multicolored apples.  Braden quickly added that if we had 10 of the other apples and 14 multicolored apples we had 24 apples all together.  Kiss your brain, Braden!  The other children excitedly agreed!

The next step was to graph the apples.  The children used their drawings to do this.  

Later, the children enjoyed the mysterious story about the little red house with no doors or windows and a tiny star living inside.  Did you know there is a star living inside of each and every apple? Ask your child about it. Then, cut an apple (preferably red) through the middle horizontally.  

The cut apples dipped in paint make wonderful prints . The children practiced creating patterns using red, yellow and green paint with their apple halves on strips of paper. The strips were then fashioned into hats which the children proudly wore home.

Apple tasting, comparing seeds from apples to seeds from pumpkins, coring and cutting apples to make warm, sweet applesauce, learning about Johnny Chapman, AKA 

Johnny Appleseed, baking apple crisp and so much more made it an apple-icious week in Junior Kindergarten.

FROGS!

Did you forget about those tadpoles that we have been raising since they were nothing more than little jelly-filled eggs?  The children sure haven't.  One of our water tables outside has become a full-blown tadpole habitat.  The children have been eagerly awaiting the metamorphosis of their wiggly little friends from tadpoles to frogs and have been observing them daily.  A couple weeks ago we noticed that some of our tadpoles had back legs.  Then suddenly they had front legs too! Last week we found two of our tadpoles had climbed out of the water and were sunning their little FROGGY selves on the side of the water table!  Although each still had a tail in this picture, they have since lost it and hopped on to experience the world.  Good luck little friends!

Pumpkin Observations

As you know, we have been studying pumpkins and everything fall this October.  During our pumpkin study we hollowed out a very large pumpkin to sort, estimate and count the seeds, explore the fleshy stuff inside and plant a seed or two in a wet paper towel and a Ziploc baggie to watch how it grows. The children are keeping a book of drawings to log the cycle of growth the little pumpkin seed goes through.  The baggies are hung in a sunny window where the children can visit them daily to see what is happening.  Some of the pumpkin seeds have already broken open and are beginning to sprout! Our big pumpkin was taken to the garden to "give back to the earth".  The children are also observing what is happening to it daily now that it is no longer full of seeds and able to "suck up" food and water from the stem and vines that once nourished it.

A few days after we removed the lid from the inside of the pumpkin where it fell (because the pumpkin was getting squishy, the kids said), the children were so excited to see that one little seed that was left at the bottom of the pumpkin had sprouted!  As the pumpkin was rotting the sides expanded and the lid fell in, allowing sunlight to get through and shine onto the little seed.  Because pumpkins are 80% water, the water at the bottom of the rotting pumpkin helped to nourish the little seed enough to burst through with new life.  Yay! We'll keep watching! Grow little seed grow!

We will continue our learning about fall fruits and veggies through observation, books, iPad research and our exciting field trip to Graham's Market.  Happy learning!

Other fun in learning last week included: pattern practice using pattern blocks, drawings, iPads and calendar. The children heard stories about the season of Fall and completed stories and illustrations of their own.  They shared them with the class.  We took a leaf walk, collecting interesting leaves in all sorts of colors.  We read The Leaf Man, by Lois Ehlert, and created our own leaf boys and girls as well as designs.  AND sooooo much more!

SHORECREST SPIRIT!

We ended the week with a little Pep Rally Fun and School Spirit! 

Members of Shorecrest sports teams escorted us in style to Friday's Pep Rally.

The children were so excited that some of them made their own necklaces, bracelets and even signs to share their school spirit!!! Go Chargers!!!!

This week the children will continue to compare and study seeds and what and how they grow.  Letter Cc will be the focus.  The children will work with graphs some more with candy and estimate and count candy corn for a little pre-Halloween math fun.  AND AGAIN, sooooo much more!

Dates to Remember:

October 23 - Picture Retakes - If you would like to have your child's picture taken again, please send the first packets of pictures back to school in their yellow bags and write us a note.

October 31 - Halloween parade 8:20 and Fall Festival 10:00

November 8 - Poetry in the Park 8:30

November 16 - Exploring and Feast for Children- We need help at exploring and to plate the food.

November 19 - 23 Thanksgiving Vacation

Happy week!

Mrs. Carson

Autumn brings all sorts of joy along with it!  

During this Fall season the children are enjoying learning all about pumpkins.  Where do they come from?  How do they grow? What is inside?  Let's investigate so we know! 
As you can see, the answers brought nothing but smiles! 

Early in the week the children were read to from the books Growing A Pumpkin Pie and The Pumpkin Book.  They saw a short film about how farmers grow pumpkins too. As part of an ongoing project they began building a bulletin board "pumpkin patch".  Using their knowledge from the books and skills taught to them by their teachers the children displayed the lifecycle of a pumpkin right in their classroom. Here is what they learned: First they till the soil, then they plant the seeds.  Add a little sunlight and water well please. Little green shoots poke up through the earth and yellow flowers signify  there will soon be a pumpkin birth.  Green vines grow round and round. The baby pumpkins scatter the ground. They are green at first and very small.  Soon they'll be orange and big, fat, small or tall. First, the children used brown paint and texture tools to paint "tilled soil" on paper.  They even added real soil to the mixture. Next, the children practiced proper scissor skills to cut on a line making a spiral from green paper.  Those were the vines that grow across the ground.  Chenile stems were twisted around carefully fan-folded yellow flowers (made of tissue paper) to create the pumpkin blossoms (Did you know that they are edible?).  A tray task where the children traced around a mini pumpkin stencil and then cut their work out, again helped hone fine motor skills with scissors and using a writing utensil purposefully.  The tiny pumpkin cut out was then carried over to a bin and placed inside where the child added yellow and green paint and slipped in a golf ball to "rock and roll" paint it the color of baby pumpkins on the vine.  Last, pumpkins were painted in all different shapes and sizes and added to complete the perfect pumpkin patch.  Come on in and see!

Digging in to pumpkins was the best part of this study, so far! Collecting seeds, predicting how many were inside, then counting them proved to be a wonderfully sticky math lesson.  The children will have a chance throughout the season of Fall to compare the seeds from pumpkins with other fruit and vegetable seeds.  We will use transparent containers to plant them and investigate their growth cycle.  As the roots go down and the sprouts go up....we'll be watching and drawing pictures of the stages as they grow. You can follow the fun in the Science Journals later this school year OR just keep your attention here for the play by play. 

Stay tuned!

Ii

Ii is for inch, and you could measure huge smiles as the children investigated ice and BEST OF ALL ice cream for a while.

Salt adheres a piece of yarn to ice

Painting with colored ice cubes on canvas

I scream, you scream.  We ALL scream for ICE CREAM!!!

Mix the ingredients, put them in a small can, surround the can with salt and ice in a larger can. Roll, roll, roll!  Roll some more!  Roll that ice cream around on the floor!  Then eat that yummy, cold sweet treat....so delicious they'll ask for more!

The children had so much fun mixing and rolling to make their sweet treat.  It was incredibly cool!

This week we will continue our Fall fun with pumpkins, an apple study, and focus on the letter Uu.

Have a wonderful week!