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!

Halloween

I'm pretty sure I just recovered from Halloween.  No really - Halloween almost did me in :)  We had a BUSY day in Kindergarten on Halloween packed with LOTS of fun! I came home and had dinner with my family and headed out for 2 hours of trick-or-treating with my babies.  I came home and sat down and uploaded pictures from our day at school to blog and I was useless and I went to bed.  So, here it is a little late, our fabulous day in Kindergarten :)

Our morning began with our first set of Rotations for the year!  During rotations, each teacher has an activity in her room that she completes with every class that rotates in there.  The teacher stays, the assistant takes the class to each room. We do them for most holidays!

We started off in Mrs. McGregor's room playing Bingo.  We found this Bingo on Teachers Pay Teachers last year I think, but I can't remember where.  Feel free to leave the link if you know where it came from! 

 Next the students traveled to Ms. Reel's room for some Spooky Musical Chairs.  I wasn't with them, but I hear Ryuya was ecstatic to win!  Ms.  Reel was super sweet and gave prizes not only to the winner, but random other students in the game too.

Next they went to Mrs. Biggs room.  They heard the story of Spookley and made their own Spookley with a sugar cookie and some orange icing. 

The last rotation was my room.  We sorted Halloween Rings and then I let them keep anyone they wanted.  I am really glad I gathered and saved these a few years ago, because these rings were impossible to find this year! 

Next up for our day of fun was a Pumpkin tasting  We had Pumpkin Pie and Pumpkin Cake.  Mrs. Payton's rule is and always has been "Take a thank you bite."   I find that students like stuff they think they won't and most of them really enjoyed both of these :)

After lunch, our families came and we got to work carving pumpkins and decorating pumpkins.  A lot of students don't get this kind of experience at home, so I love doing it with them.  It is an exhausting experience, but a rewarding one!

 I seem to be missing a few pictures of the decorated pumpkins, but they were all super cute.  We used hot glue to attach the pieces to the face, but the students told us what they wanted to put on there.  If you do this, I recommend having several people help and several hot glue guns.  Also, lots of reminders not to mess with the stuff on their face because it will fall off haha :)

I am so thankful to have wonderful group of parents to help us with all of these fun activities in the afternoon!

Are you still with me? Sorry for the picture overload! What did your class do special for Halloween?