Exciting Week

     We've had the funnest week in school.  Students are CRAZY excited for Halloween every year.  This COULD make for a very long week with lots of frustration but this isn't my first rodeo and I've mastered how to channel that energy into learning FUN.

     To start off the week, our class was BOO'd.  Halloween pencils and erasers were left on our desks.  It was quite a mystery as to who left them and we had lots of suspects (stay tuned this story continues later in post).

     We've finished our unit on spiders.  The children had fun, learned a lot and most importantly, were MOTIVATED.  What's better than that?  Here is our spider bulletin board.

      Miss Kaitlyn, who is Mr. Peter's substitute, was very impressed and left us this note.

     Many children then thought that Miss Kaitlyn was our prime BOO suspect because she's in the school when we are gone and may have seen something.  I told her she was under suspicion and she left us this note the next day. 

     Then guess what?  We got BOO'd again, spider rings, and the class was counting on Miss Kaitlyn to help us solve the mystery.  Let me tell you, she didn't disappoint.  She created a list of hidden clues scattered around the classroom, each with one letter of the culprits name.  Each clue led to a new clue.  What FUN we had searching for clues to solve the mystery.

   These post-its were the clues and look who the BOOer was!  We thank Miss Kaitlyn for making each morning SOOOOOO FUN.

     We also finished reading the Haunted Library.  I picked up a set of these books from Scholastic because they were a dollar.  WHOOO WHEEEE, what a find.  The story was great.  The kids loved it and I did too.  When we finished, I asked the kids to write in their journals about the story.  They could write anything they wanted; favorite part, their opinion, whatever.  Some wanted to continue the story and write more chapters.  Great idea I thought.  It got even better when they were begging me to bring their journals home to write more and asking to write in their free time.  YIPPEE!!!!

     We "played" quite a few Halloween themed learning centers.  We created graphs, sorted spooky nouns, and created ghostly fact families.  

     Creepy Carrots was our book of the week.  I was lucky enough to even have "creepy carrots" for show and tell from Mrs. McEleiney's garden.  We did lots of great activities with this story.  We played with vocabulary, sequenced events and found important story elements.  

     In math, we are still working on those PESKY word problems!!!!  We made it fun this week by scooting around the room to find word problems scattered about on cards to solve.  

     November has started, where does the time go?  REMINDER- NO SCHOOL ON TUESDAY (Election Day).  NO SCHOOL ON NOV. 11 (Veteran's Day).  There will be Veteran's Day Program on Nov. 7th but only 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders are performing.   Thanksgiving will be here before you know it.