Happy Birthday Johnny Appleseed

 We got to go out and have our "apple eating" party today at the end of the day.

 Pictures of our apple print art.

 The big books I read to our class.

 One of our poems we are using to practice reading fluency.

 Here are a few student samples of our character chart for Johnny Appleseed.  I love when other teachers share great free ideas online.

Just a little peek at our Fall celebration day.

Each student in our class was asked to bring an apple to school today.  We did many fun math and literacy activities with apples to celebrate the 1st of fall.  We graphed our apples according to color, we read our  Scholastic News about apples, learned a bit about the legend Johnny Appleseed and did some fun art.  We ran out of time to have an "apple eating party" at the end of the day.  If your child would like, they may bring an apple to school Monday and we'll go outside and eat our apples then.

 Our apple art.  We used apples to make prints with paint.

 This is an addition game that will be in our math stations.  Each student works with a partner, and two dice.  They each roll the dice and add the dots on the dice to see how many apples to draw on their tree.  They also have to fill in the blanks on their paper to make an addition story problem.

ex. Conner has 5 apples.

Kaycee has 6 apples.

How many apples in all?

11

This is a fun and easy game to play at home.  Each student should have brought home their paper from playing the game in class.  All you need is a pencil to write down your names and numbers and a pair of dice.

 The students made their own graph in their math journals.

 Here is a graph the students helped me fill out.

 Here is our class sitting on the floor next to our giant graph.  We took one smiling picture and one silly face picture.

Also, my camera battery died so I didn't get to take some pictures of a few of our apple activities.  I'll try to take some more pictures of them on Monday.
One of the activities I wasn't able to take a picture  of was this cute idea for a main character chart about Johnny Appleseed I found here http://eberhartsexplorers.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-about-them-apples.html  I'll post pictures of this Monday.

Main Character

These are some student samples of a character web we've learned to use.  I read  

How I Became a Pirate by Melinda Long and David Shannon  and

Pirates Don't Change Diapers by Melinda Long and David Shannon to our class.  We then discussed and decided that the main character in these two stories was Jeremy Jacob.  We then brainstormed ideas of things that describe this main character.  It was fun to see some of the things the students came up with about this fun character.

We have also been busy working on things that will be used during reading center time.  Reading groups start on Monday September 26th.  Students will spend time in a guided reading group for part of our "power hour", then the rest of the time they are working with a small group doing reading centers.  During reading centers students are practicing skills they already have learned.  Students practice reading and writing during this time.  A big thanks to our parent and grandparent helpers who signed up to come help at centers.  Anyone else who would like to help, please let me know.  :)

Pictures of partners working with their math stations

This past summer I read an awesome book about Math work stations. 

Math Work Stations: Independent Learning You Can Count On, K-2 by Debbie Diller

I decided this was a great way to get students practicing Math in  a more "hands on"/ applicable way while they are having fun and loving Math.  We do our whole group Math lesson and work, then the class breaks up into pairs (see our previous post with pictures of how this looks).  This does take more time on my part to get so many different stations prepared, but the results so far have been great!  

Math Stations.. up and going! :)