Bats! Bats! Bats!

The children really enjoyed learning about bats this week. We read lots of nonfiction. The children shared their knowledge of bats by making a bat tree map. Then the children made a TLC bat picture and dictated bat facts for the pictures. These are displayed in the hallway. They made bat wrist puppets and wrote a sentence about their bats.

Bat Facts

The children listened to Stellaluna and then made paper bag Stellaluna puppets. They completed sentences telling about Stellaluna and glued these on the back of the puppets. We read about owls one day and made a diagram comparing owls and bats, telling how they were alike and different.



Since school began, the children have been reading to themselves (Read to Self time) every day for longer periods each day. They are up to 12 minutes of reading time now. This week they learned the procedures for reading to a friend (Read to Someone time). Partners sit EEKK, elbow to elbow and knee to knee. They take turns reading to each other, either from the same book or different books. Mrs. B and I move around the room listening to different pairs read. The children did a great job for their first Read to Someone time. From now on, we will alternate between Read to Self and Read to Someone.

Fall and Scarecrows

Although the weather is still warm and it doesn't feel too much like fall, our theme for the week was the season. We read and talked about the signs of fall and sang our song about the four seasons. The children made fall trees to illustrate the poem "Fall Leaves".

We made the funniest class book, Scarecrow, Scarecrow. The children drew pictures of scarecrows. I took pictures of the children looking like they were scared and paired the pictures with the rhyme: Scarecrow, scarecrow, how scary can you be? You scared Sofia (each child's name went here) but you didn't scare me! The photos/rhymes went in the book opposite the scarecrows each child drew. It has become a favorite class book.

The children made really cute TLC scarecrows and we hung those in the hall. Next week's theme is bats. We are looking forward to that and to Family Reading Night on Tuesday. We have some fun nursery rhyme activities planned for that night.

Fire Safety

We had fun learning about fire safety this week. The children colored and cut out Fire Safety Sam and then wrote fire safety rules for Sam to hold. They made TLC firemen and firetrucks. All of this made a great display in the hallway. We sang "I'm A Firefighter" and added the song/poem to our poetry books. Every week we add a poem or song to the books. We read them and highlight letters, letter chunks, punctuation and words. We read many nonfiction books about fire safety and watched "Play Safe, Be Safe" with Fireman Dan. We used toilet paper tubes to make firefighter puppets.

The children finished their body parts scarecrows by adding movable arms and legs after talking about our muscles and how they help us move.
In math, we worked on positional words - above, below, between, beside, near, far. The children began reading patterns and copying them.

Next week we will begin our Fall theme which we will work on over the next few weeks.