October in a Blog Post

Now that we've gotten past September, let's still pretend it's not January and reverse it back to October.  Yep, Fall.  Holy Cow, October was BUSY y'all.

We continued learning our letters and making our Alphabet hats from Simply Kinder!

We made our first visit to the Community Garden across the street!  Seriously, crossing the street is a big deal!  In the Spring, we will go once a week and learn all about how to garden!  This is the first time we've ever gone in the Fall.  When we go in the Spring, we don't get a chance to see a lot of the crops fully grown, so Ms. Joni, the master gardener, invited us to see the garden in the Fall this year.  The kids were simply amazed! They truly enjoyed the insects of course, but they enjoyed the crops too.  Someone saw eggplant and told Mrs. Bradley they were hot dogs, we have a lot to learn!

In October, our kids raised a TON of money for our school through the Boosterthon Fun Run! The kids took donations and then ran about 2 miles (around 36 laps!)  It's such an amazingly exciting event for the students.  The people who coordinate this have more energy than I can even explain and get the kids SUPER hyped up!  The kids get prizes for their pledges and they were so excited to run.  Our team name was the PB Jelly Jammers (P for me, Payton and B for Mrs. Bradley our assistant!)  She came up with our awesome name and the kids LOVED it!

As you know, October is Fire Safety Month! We love to finger paint, so we finger painted some flames!  I displayed it with a sign that said "This Class is on Fire!" and every time I walked by I got the Alicia Keys song stuck in my head.  Did you sing it?? Is it stuck in your head now? You're welcome!  

The fire clowns came to visit us and there was a girl clown for the first time ever! They are always super silly, but they have a lot of good information for the students.  I usually try to ask my friend who is a fire fighter to come visit us with a fire truck from his station, but he had just gotten back from a deployment, so imagine my surprise when we went out to see the fire truck after seeing the fire trucks and we saw Mr. Joe the fire fighter!  The kids enjoyed seeing the fire truck!

We made spider hats! Always a favorite of mine in October.  I blogged about how to make them over at The Primary Pack.

We had Pumpkin Rotations!  They played Bingo, heard a spooky story, played guess who?, played spooky musical chairs, made a Spookly the Pumpkin cookie, and sorted Halloween rings!

We had Pumpkin centers with parents! Our awesome parents came out and helped us carve 5 pumpkins! 

We also decorated tiny pumpkins with all sorts of goodies and hot glue guns and had orange snacks!

Some of the resources I used in October were: (You can always download or wishlist for next year!)

These Freebies:

          

These paid resources:

So that's October in a blog post! Hopefully you made it through! :) See you tomorrow for November!

Planting Zinnias

This was an ugly rainy week for most of the Kindergarten classes, but fortunately, we made it over to the garden! This week, Ms. Joni taught us how to plant Zinnia seeds in plastic cups.  They filled plastic cups with soil, used their two fingers to make a "peace sign" to put two holes in the soil, put two seeds in, and then covered them up.  Easy peasy!

We haven't been to the garden in 3 weeks because of the break and the plants had grown so much!  Ms. Joni sent some strawberries back with us to cut up and eat...they were delicious! :) 

Before we left a few rain drops got us, but thankfully the bottom didn't fall out until about 30 minutes later.  The kids really enjoy the garden and we are so thankful for Ms. Joni and Ms. Doris for always teaching us something new! 

The kids always seem to be more fascinated with the bugs than the plants, so when we get to worm week this group should have a blast! :)  

We will be studying all about plants this week coming up and I can't wait to show them a few really neat things with plants that will connect with what Ms. Joni has been teaching us!

Needs some plant activities?

We're using these fun centers in our room next week :)  What activities do you like to do with plants?

Community Garden

We are really blessed to have an opportunity to visit a Community Garden across the street from our school.  This initiative started as a grant a few years ago and only a few classes were able to go, but now all the Kindergarten classes go once a week to the garden.  It's an inter-generational thing, so there are seniors there volunteering to work with our little guys.  I am not a gardener in the least, so I learn something every time we go!

This is what the Welcome Garden looks like when it's all grown.  It doesn't look like this just yet :) 

Every week when we go, our wonderful Master Gardener Ms. Joni has something planned for us to do and then there is a volunteer as well.  We break into 2 groups and do 2 activities and then we switch and do the other activity.  We do things like weed, plant, water etc.  The students learn about worms, the compost bin and they take a tour of the garden every week so they get to see how everything is growing every time.  It's really a great experience.

 Looking at plant parts (flowers) with magnifying glasses.

 Here they learned about how the bugs eat up the plants and using things other than chemicals to kill them.  Ms. Joni talked to them about hand picking them and putting them in soapy water, but they were petting it first.

 Checking out the strawberries and how much they have grown.