Recapping October 2022: 🎃
This ‘Spooky Season’ (October 2022) was filled with hands-on STEM (buoyancy labs, DIY lava lamps, & cookie dunking!), arts/crafts, and Halloween-themed learning! We also took our ‘fieldtrip’ to Costa Rica & learned about different cultures. Here is a recap of the highlights – or you can DOWNLOAD + PRINT THE FULL VERSION HERE: [October 2022 Newsletter].
Monthly Highlights:
- HOLIDAY PARTY: Our Halloween Party (games, Halloween-themed math and writing, and our movie) was tons of fun! Plus, getting to snuggle on the couch was an added perk.
- LAVA LAMPS: Making these was such a blast! I had the kids guess what we were making (and kept it a secret until adding the Alka seltzer). They loved watching their colors mix together!
- OPEN HOUSE: I LOVED hosting & seeing parents in the mini seats! A big thanks to everyone who came and participated in the stations!
What We’re Up To In Math:
We’ve been doing Halloween Stations all month, focusing on ordering numbers, determining greater/less than, grouping, skip counting, and identifying patterns (+2, +5, +10, etc.)
We also got to do Halloween Candy Math which involved sorting, counting, and making/analyzing bar graphs!
What We’re Up To In Science:
October was all about buoyancy & seeing whether objects would sink or float based on their density, weight and construction.
- The Great Cookie Dunk – The kids LOVED making a hypothesis for each cookie, dunking & taste-testing in this ‘Sink or Float’ Lab.
- Lava Lamps – Watching the oil, water, and Alka Seltzer mix & separate was so neat! It was fun to see how different densities came together (or didn’t) within the plastic jar.
- Buoyancy Labs – We also tested how different elements (like salt in water) would help or hurt an object’s ability to float.
Here are more images from our labs! ↓
What We’re Up To In Language Arts:
PHONICS, GRAMMAR + LANGAGE
A big push this month was learning to identify, label & add-in nouns, verbs, adjectives (and beginning adverbs, too!). We are also working on subjects & predicates and determining the WHO/WHAT vs. the ACTION part of our reading/writing.
We’ve also been counting syllables and sound parts of words, as well as ways we can sort and determine the meaning through prefix, suffix & base!
READING + WRITING
We started a new book in our afternoon class – ‘A Bear Named Trouble’ (realistic fiction about a bear) – where students are making predictions & inferences and crafting their own ‘alternate endings’ to chapters.
In addition to writing, they’re learning about animals, habitats, hibernation and building academic vocabulary.
What We’re Up To In Social Studies:
Our big focus for Social Studies is immersing ourselves in different cultures (Costa Rica & soon the Philippines!) through tasting, decorating, and listening to music. We’re also finding these locations on the map, playing games to build recognition of continents and oceans, and drawing similarities and differences between the customs of these places and our own.
The afternoon students also worked in small-groups on Costa Rican ‘Kiwi Crates’ & built a macaw and ox cart!
‘Fieldtrips’ + Rainy Day Changes:
We had a few rainy days this month, which gave us the chance to switch things up with indoor stations, crafts & lunch – a nice break in the routine!
‘FIELDTRIP’ TO COSTA RICA:
For our ‘fieldtrip,’ we stamped passports and traveled to the rainforest!
The kids enjoyed listening to music, decorating outfits, and trying gallo pinto & mango refrescos – I was so proud of how many were brave and tried both!
Other October 2022 Updates:
It’s hard to believe we’re almost halfway through the semester! We’ve kept our “High, Low, Buffalo” — ‘High’ is a happy moment, ‘Low’ is a bad moment, and ‘Buffalo’ is a random moment — tradition alive! Here is our ‘High Low Buffalo’ for October 2022:
- High: Doing Halloween crafts! The overwhelming feedback of this month was “Miss Marisa, we need to do more crafts!” This month we made skeletons, toilet-paper figures, and Frankensteins (coupled with sentence-writing). I love that the kids got into these activities & it felt like fun (even though there was fine-motor, STEM and/or writing built in!)
- Low: We weren’t able to finish our Halloween party movie before friends were picked up… but, there was popcorn, balloons, and couch-cuddling time. . . so was it really all that bad?!
- Buffalo: The kids taught me about the ‘Switch Witch’ that trades Halloween candy for prizes, toys, or money. It was awesome to hear how many of them willingly traded in for an upgrade – now that’s smart!
Spotlight Students:
Each month we celebrate a student (or students) who are doing exceptional academic work and/or been outstanding in terms of behavior, attitude, or empathy towards others.
This month, both Winslow & Lily are being recognized for going above and beyond to help their classmates.
Their empathy & thoughtfulness has not gone unnoticed. Thank you both for being class leaders!
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You can also download the full October 2022 Newsletter [RIGHT HERE].
