The month of October 2024 was filled with fieldtrips (pumpkin patch & movies), our class Picture Day, and the completion of both our Social Studies “Hero Project” (recognizing heroes in different areas and time periods) and The Wild Robot novel study!
Monthly Highlights:
- Oma’s Fieldtrip — Our first fieldtrip of the academic year was to Oma’s Family Farm! For some students, this was their second (or even third year!) going, but for some students it was their first! They loved the hands-on activities, like feeding the goats, sliding down the cotton seed hill, or jumping on the extra-large bounce pad! (PS: You can watch our fieldtrip recap video here or see the Reel embedded below!)
- Picture Day — We had our class picture day on October 9th! This was so fun and the weather turned out absolutely perfect for outdoor shots! Everyone’s photos were so adorable! (Here’s the recap video of our experience with Ashley Perry Photography! Or you can watch the embedded video below, too!)
- The Wild Robot Movie— Our Tuesday crew finished the novel study of The Wild Robot and got to see the movie in theaters (alongside some other class peers and parents)! The movie was definitely a tear-jerker, and it helped us to connect meaningfully with our reading by comparing what was the same and/or different than the text!
“Gala” (Mondays + Wednesdays):
- Phonics, Spelling & ELA (English & Language Arts): October was focused on some specific skills – diagraphs, ‘Magic E’ words, and more. This month, we did a lot of ‘Write the Room’ activities, where students had to hunt around the classroom for little cards and write down either sounds or spell the entire word! This was a great way to build teamwork and some friendly competition. We also had fun with ‘Roll and Write,’ where a dice gave us our writing destiny. For Columbus Day, we made a craft and learned a little bit about this holiday and why it’s been renamed to ‘Indigenous Peoples Day.’
- Math & Reasoning: A big focus of this month was building more automaticity with our adding and subtracting. We played ‘Dice Math’ (where students would roll two dice and add the numbers together) or engaged with different math activities related to Halloween and/or pumpkins. Something that our students really enjoyed post Halloween was graphing and other activities related to candy! 🍬
- STEM/Social Studies: This month we did a mini Animal Project where students not only did some research on an animal of choice, but they also got to create their own, too! To conclude our study of habitats, we made ‘Marshmallow Habitats,’ which is always a hit! Our creations included huts, forts, and even an igloo! We also began our study on Living & Non-Living things, playing games and looking at different attributes to understand what really defines something as living vs. not.
“Slice” (Mondays):
- English & Language Arts: Our October 2024 writing lessons for our ‘Slice’ group focused a lot on chronological order and ensuring that our writing has a strong beginning, middle, and end. Students worked both independently and as a group creating stories (and making them silly, of course!). We also continue to work on basic mechanics of writing, refining our punctuation, sentence structure, grammar, and spelling.
- Math & Reasoning: In math, we’re building our 2-digit reasoning skills, including a more automatic understanding of the ‘stealing’ and ‘carrying’ rules when adding or subtracting multi-digit numbers. This is done mostly through games, and our students really engaged with whiteboard learning, where they can write answers on their boards and challenge one another to not only be quick to respond but accurate in their responses!
“Honeycrisp” (Tuesdays):
- English & Language Arts: In October, we (almost!) finished reading The Wild Robot, and had the unique opportunity to see the movie before reading the final chapters to compare/contrast our novel to what we saw. This provided endless opportunities for journaling, carefully investigating the author’s purpose, and looking more critically at main characters in the book vs. the movie.
- Math & Reasoning: Continuing with multiplication and division, our goal this month was to really learn strategies to connect these two operations and use things like skip-counting to help us solve faster and/or when we’re having trouble. We also looked at division as repeated subtraction (and with visual arrays!), which really helped our Tuesday crew to conceptualize this better!
“Slice” (Thursdays):
- Morning “Slice”: Something we really focused on this month was plurals and subject/predicate agreement. Using Halloween as our focus, we practiced matching different subjects to their predicates (and had fun picking silly ones, too!). We also did a lot of Halloween math stations, practicing and/or brushing up on our place value, addition/subtraction, and greater than/less than skills.
- Social Studies: This month we completed our ‘Hero’ project, by putting together the final pieces of our hero ‘cards’ and presenting our findings and chosen heroes to one another. The cool thing about this project was refreshing one another’s memory about individuals we covered almost a month ago and why we thought they were important.
- STEM: October we continued our learning about gravity, specifically comparing our gravity on earth to the (lack of) gravity in space. We watched a short video of an astronaut comparing speeds of objects in space vs. Earth and did our own experiments with both Ping Pong Balls (testing speed based on weight/mass) as well as apples (half-apple vs. whole apple) and measuring the effect of gravity on different sized-objects on Earth. This was fun!
Other October 2024 Updates:
- Halloween Party! — Our yearly Halloween party is always a blast! Hosted on the actual holiday (yay!) a bunch of our friends got together to play outdoor games, do some crafts, watch a short trick-or-treating film, and exchange “treats.” The fun thing about this party is that on a day already saturated with sweet treats, our “Treat Exchange” is for non-candy items (like toys, fidgets, squishies, etc.). This was a blast and the kids were so excited for all the things they got to play with! Plus, it was one of the first times that friends from other classes got to hangout together!
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