Week 8: Pumpkin Time!

Books We Read
Pumpkin Cat
Who Said Boo?:  A Book of Halloween Poems
The Bumpy Little Pumpkin

Song of the Week
The Three Ghosts
Oooooooooooooooo! 1, 2, 3!
Oooooooooooooooo! Ghosts are we!
Oooooooooooooooo!  When you sleep...
Oooooooooooooooo!  Then we creep!
Oooooooooooooooo!  You won't hear...
Oooooooooooooooo!  When we're near!
Oooooooooooooooo!  What we do....
Oooooooooooooooo!  We scare you!
BOO!!!

Weekly Centres
The Letter R
We added the letter "R" to our printing base, with it being the last of the "Frog Jump Letters".  Just in time to try writing some letters all by ourselves in next week's portfolio!

My Halloween Costume
Everybody got a piece of paper with a blank person, and we had to draw a picture of what we thought we would be for Halloween this year.

Ghosts
We covered egg cartons with white paint and then added chopped up white tissue all around.  Then we added googly eyes and Mr. McCullough finished the ghosts off with a pipe cleaner.  Now, they're hanging scarily at the front of the class!

Sight Word Magnets
After adding "it" and "of" to our sight words, we repeated our sight word challenge, trying to make those words while still working on "on" and "and".

Other Things We Did
We started learning about pumpkins.  The first thing we did was talk to a friend and tell them what we knew about pumpkins.  Then, we listened to what our friends knew about pumpkins.  Finally, we shared what we knew about pumpkins with the class.

Mr. McCullough took us to see the leftover pumpkins from the Harvest Festival.  We gave our ideas about which pumpkins were older (we thought it would be the biggest ones), which ones had the most seeds (again, we thought it would be the biggest ones) and which ones were heavier and how we could find out for sure (we could pick them up).

We all made a prediction about whether a pumpkin would float or sink.  Surprisingly, EVERYBODY  in the class thought that, in spite of its size, the pumpkin would float, saying things like "vegetables usually float" and "it has nothing inside, so it will float".  We'll find out next week!

We added M and R to our Jolly Jingle songs!

After learning The Three Ghosts, we surprised our Reading Buddies by hiding in the room, singing them the song while we were hidden and then jumping out to surprise them!

We talked about the difference between stories and poems, learning that poems were like short little stories.  They have less words, can sometimes rhyme, and can be quick, interesting and funny.