This coming week we will be having parent teacher conferences on Thursday afternoon and Friday all day.  This is a valuable time for us to talk about how things are going for your child in school so far and for you to ask me any questions you may have.  If you have not already signed up for a time slot, please go to: https://pickatime.com/client?ven=11600501 to schedule a time.  Let me know if you have any technical difficulty!  Also let me know if these times do not fit with your schedule, I am happy to work with you to find an time that does work.

To allow for conferences, we will have early dismissal (2:45) on Thursday Oct. 20, and NO SCHOOL on Friday Oct. 21.  

A GIANT Thank you to our room parents who came in on Wednesday afternoon and hung lots of spooky Halloween decorations for us to enjoy!  The Lemurs love looking at everything and are getting very excited for Halloween celebrations.

Last week we were busy counting pumpkins seeds, creating static electricity, and learning about a bat’s point of view.

Small Group Treehouses This Week:

Monday – No School

Tuesday
Science – Pumpkin KWHL Chart – The Lemurs scooped out all the seeds inside a large pumpkin.  We talked about what we already know about pumpkins, what we want to know, how we can find out.  Later we will talk about what we learned.
Science – Static Electricity – Mrs. Kirsh had the Lemurs’ hair standing on end in this treehouse!  The Lemurs learned about positive and negative charges.  See the previous post for a video of the Lemurs making water bend with static electricty!
Science – Nocturnal Creature Book – Bats – We learned how bats “see” at night using echolocation.  We then created another page in our growing nocturnal creature portfolio.

Wednesday
Reading – Guided Reading, -at family book – Children read books from their book bags, both independantly and to each other.  They read with a teacher a “bat” book with words from the -at word family.
Math – Counting pumpkin seeds – counting by 10s – It took ALL day, but the Lemurs worked as a team to glue down all the pumpkin seeds we took out of the pumpkin. To make it easier to count, we glued them down in groups of ten.
Science/Art – Nocturnal Creature Books – Fox – The fox has SO many creature powers!  This quickly has become a favorite animal of many students.  We watched an amazing video of a fox using it’s incredible hearing power & digging power to catch mice hidden deep beneath the snow.

Thursday
Reading – Point of View – Stellaluna – Students listened to the book Stellalunna by Jannell Cannon.  This is the story of a little bat who is lost from her mother and lands into a bird nest.  She grows up thinking that she is a bird.  Later in the book she finds her mother and learns to do things like a bat again.  This book ties into our learning about “point of view.”  Stellaluna was able to see things from the point of view of a bat and as a bird.
Math – Counting by 10s – After all of our pumpkin seeds were glued down, we set to the task of counting them.  TOO many to count by 1s, so we counted by 10s.  We came up with 435 pumpkin seeds!  You can see them hanging in the pre-k hallway.
Handwriting – Whiteboard letters & words – The Lemurs worked on writing vowels, consonants, and cvc words.

Friday
Writing/Art – Bat vs. Bird point of view – We talked more about Stellaluna and her point of view.  The lemurs tried to hang upside down like a bat and see how our classroom looks from that perspective!  Then students created a drawing and a sentence to describe the point of view of either a bird (awake durign day, sleeps upright) or a bat (awake during night, sleeps upside down)
Math – Tricky Teens – Young children often reverse teen numbers (say “31” instead of “13”) We played a game today with some spooky ghosts to help us to read the tricky teens without reversing them.
Game – Skippity – Mrs. KIrsh taught students how to play Skippity, a more colorful and elaborate form of Checkers.

Our classroom was transformed into the Nocturnal Forest…we are learning about all the creatures who are awake at night while diurnal creatures like us, are asleep!  We have been learning about all the nocturnal “creature powers” that animals have.

We are also learning about pumpkins…we will be studying the pumpkin cycle, counting pumpkin seeds, growing magical pumpkins, and making pumpkin bread.

Halloween 

We will celebrate Halloween on Monday, October 31st.  The children should bring costumes to school, we just ask that you do not include masks or weapon accessories.  Our wonderful room parents, Prachi Kumar (Myra), Mamta Kapadia (Dhruv) and Ahlam Qaimari (Reed), are planning a fun festive Halloween party for the Lemurs.  At 3:00 we will join the rest of Quest in a costume parade around the school.  Please come and cheer our little ones on!

Small Group Treehouse Activities This Week:

Monday
Science – Intro to Nocturnal Animals, the tarzier – We started off our unit on the nocturnal forest by watching part of a Wild Kratts video about the tarzier’s night vision.  We learned how eyes work to take in light at night.  Nocturnal animals have super night vision power.
Math – October Calendar – We practiced number writing by creating a new calendar for the month of October.
Social Studies – German Unification Day Our own Mrs. Kirsh, former German teacher, likes to occasionally teach the Lemurs about her German heritage.  Monday was German Unification Day.  We learned some new German words and made a little German flag.

Tuesday
Reading – Guided Reading/Letterschool – Each child had a turn sitting with a teacher to read a decodable book at the child’s current level.  While waiting, the rest of the group used iPads to work on handwriting with the Letter School app.
Math – Stinky Cheese Game – We played this fun math game once before, practicing to count to 20.  Today we played the game with practicing to count by 10s to 100.
Science/Art – Owls –  We learned about the nocturnal creature powers of owls today.  The Lemurs created a new page in their nocturnal animal books after trying to fly with soft, silent wings like an owl.

Wednesday
Reading – Feed the Raccoon – We practiced letter identification and matching lowercase to uppercase with this fun game.  Letters were hidden in the forest for students to find and feed to a hungry raccoon.
Math – The Symmetry Game – We introducted students to symmetry with this game.  STudents worked with a partner to create symmetrical designs using pattern blocks.
Art – Painting Pumpkin Paper – There is not just one shade of orange!  Using liquid watercolor, students created 5 shades of orange to use to create 5 pumpkins for our board.

Thursday
Reading – Intro to Point of View – Throughout the year we will talk about “point of view.”  This is the idea that different people can have a different perspective on the same topic, and this is OKAY!  We all have our own point of view and it is always insightful to learn about someone else’s point of view.  For an example, we all said what we think is the “best color.”  Everyone had a different point of view!  We read the marvelous book, Voices in the Park by Anthony Browne, to illustrate this point.
Math – 100 Pumpkins Farm – Using the shades of orange paper we painted on Wednesday, students each cut out 5 pumpkins and added to our pumpkin farm board.  Once 20 students each create 5 pumpkins, we will have 100 pumpkins!
Writing – Whiteboard Letters – We practiced writing all the vowels and some consonants, saying the sounds for each letter.  Students then were challenged to create CVC words with those letters.

Friday
Game – Stone Soup Mrs. Kirsh played this popular memory game with groups today, Stone Soup by Peacable Kingdom.  Peacable Kingdom makes a number of cooperative board games for young children.  Cooperative games are different than normal competive games in that the players work together as a team to win the game.
Math – Symmetrical Pumpkins – Students used brown paint to create a design on one half of a paper pumpkin, then folded over the paper to create a symmetrical design.  Students then practiced scissor skills by cutting out a green spiral vine to attach to their pumpkin.
Science/Art- Crickets – We learned about the nocturnal creature powers of the cricket today.  We read The Very Quiet Cricket by Eric Carle.   I brought in a tiny live cricket for us to observe.  Much to our surprise, the young cricket molted right in front of us!  After the cricket shed it’s skin, it was completely white.  But with each hour, the cricket quickly started turning brown again.  Amazing!