Costumes, Pumpkins, and Candy OH MY!

This past week was a WHIRL WIND in room 103. From storybook character day, to festive activities, to the cancellation of our field trip; we have been busy! I have lots of pictures and info to catch y'all up on the happenings in our classroom. First, storybook character day! Wow, this was one of the best years we have had for storybook characters. Almost everyone in the class dressed as a fictional storybook character and even brought the book to share with the class. I was very impressed with everyone's creativity and willingness to participate. Thank you so much! You have no idea how much it means to our school family to have such active parents :)

Here's a look at some of our fabulous storybook characters:

I was Chrysanthemum. The kids seemed to really love that story and understand the message of it this year. 

We had a little fun with Halloween candy that day also. We practiced our additional skills and writing number sentences with our candy grab bags. 

You may have heard about our little pumpkin experiment we started at the beginning of October. We simply cut open the top of a pumpkin, left everything inside as it was, topped it with potting soil, added some water and voila! It started sprouting new pumpkin plants within a couple of days.  It finally got so big this past week that we went ahead and planted it in the ground. Mrs. Newton was so sweet to let us plant our pumpkins in the school's butterfly garden. The kid's had a blast helping plant our special pumpkin!

Finally we had a little fun with our large pumpkin in the classroom on Friday. With the field trip having to be postponed I decided to make Friday as exciting as possible for the kiddos. That meant a pumpkin investigation! We have had this pumpkin in our room the past month. We voted for what type mouth, eyes, and nose that I would paint on it. We had a ton of fun exploring the different parts of our pumpkin, see our investigation below!

Our pumpkin was 14 cubes tall. 

It weighed 9 lbs. 

It did NOT float in a large tub of water. 

We then all took turns (those who wanted to) scooping out the seeds. 

We took out all of the seeds and put them into groups of ten. We stopped counting at 250 seeds. We estimated past that, that there were probably about 450 seeds in the pumpkin.

We recorded all of this in our investigation books.  

Finally, we had a big first grade picnic for lunch on Friday followed by some chalk fun. We just felt awful about postponing the field trip and wanted to make the day as fun as possible!

Don't forget to mark your calendars. Friday November 22 is the new field trip date for P-6 Farms!