Fall into Fall

I apologize again for the lateness of this blog. We are truly having technical difficulties getting into the google server. We were really excited to begin our fall theme today. We began the day telling our favorite fall activities. We will make a graph later in the week. Our word of the day today was "had". It was a rule follower. It was popular, too. We wrote the -ad word family on the "sad dad". This word is closely related to his "brothers" have and has. Today's word happened already - past tense. After word of the day, we met in Mrs. Lauber's room for our social studies lesson. Mrs. Lauber and Mrs. Myers each read us a nonfiction book about fall. They both had mostly facts, but a few opinions about fall. We practiced telling fact and opinion statements. For morning work tomorrow, we will write one fact and one opinion about fall. After that, we went to recess. Then, it was time for math. We warmed up for math by playing a new skip counting game. To help us practice counting by 5's, Mrs. Myers had us make a circle. Then she handed out cards with the numbers from 5 to 100 (skip counting by 5's). We had to put ourselves in order by 5's while she timed us. The first time was a disaster. It took us 2:43 seconds. The second time, it only took us 40 seconds. That is the new record. We are going to play this game everyday this week at morning meeting to see if we can beat this record. After we were all warmed up, we used leaved to make repeating and growing patterns. Both kinds of patterns begin the same, but a repeating pattern stays the same, where a growing pattern changes and gets bigger. We worked with a partner to make growing patterns with our cubes, and then we compared each groups patterns. Last, we made repeating and growing patterns on a worksheet. By then, it was already lunch. After recess, we read another story with Mrs. Lauber's class. Before the story, we worked in pairs. Mrs. Myers gave us each a leave with a fall vocabulary word. We sorted the word into a category - fall sights, fall weather, fall activities, fall holidays. Then, we listened to the story, Autumn Leaves. After the story, we check our sort. We only had to change a few things. Then, we each wrote a page for our class book, In the Fall. After our lesson, we had a new center tour for our fall language arts centers. In the games center, we are sorting leaves onto word family trees by picture. We are practicing the -at, -and, and -it families. In the magnetic letters center, we are spelling word of the day words on leaves by matching the letters. When we record the answers, we have to fill in the missing letters and use the words in a sentence. In the listening center, we are listening to the story, The Nutty Nutcatchers. We are drawing, writing, and citing our favorite part in the book. The last center is the poetry center. It is a new fall poem called Autumn. We each get to take a turn leading our group in the poem. We even get to use Mrs. Myers' pointer. After we all read the poem together, we are making a personal connection to something in the poem and writing about it in our folder. Tomorrow the art center will open! After centers, Mrs. Myers taught us how to do "making words". She handed out letters and we colored them red if they were vowels and blue if they were consonants. Then, we cut our letters apart and began making and sharing two letter words. Then we did the same with three letter words. At the end o the lesson, Mrs. Myers asked us to make the "super jumbo bonus word"! We used all of our letters to make the word that matched Mrs. Myers' clues. The word was "falling". Madison had the word first! At the end of the lesson, we read the list of words that we made. Then, Mrs. Myers played the word detective game with us. She gave a clue and we made the word from the list that matched her clue. It was fun. We can't wait until next week when we get to do "making words" again! Finally, it was time for art! Check out the cool art project we made today! More fall fun tomorrow!