October has been full of many wonderful activities. The arrival of fall has brought a little cooler weather.  The square was the shape of the month and yellow was the color we explored in October.  During the last week of the month, orange was introduced by mixing yellow and red.

Students learned about spiders: why they spin webs, how many legs and eyes they have, and how most have poor eyesight.  The children were able to sing songs about spiders, act out finger plays about spiders, and play a spider Bingo game as part of circle time.  Dancing spiders were hanging in the room!

On Blessing of the Animals Day the students brought their favorite furry friend to chapel.  Mrs. Dawson blessed quite a variety of animals!

One of the highlights of the month was a visit from the Aledo Fire Department.  The firefighters showed the children all the equipment on the truck and let each child walk through and sit in the truck.  While talking about fire safety, the three-year-olds learned the importance of smoke detectors and family fire exit safety plans.  Everyone also got to practice their stop, drop and roll technique!

Students explored pumpkins inside and out.  We ended the month with a trip to the CED Pumpkin Patch where pumpkins were carefully selected to bring home.  Pajama Day was a hit with both students and teachers!

Froggy is going home with a new friend every Wednesday.  He usually has a very busy weekend with his friends.  The children are also learning about their classmates through the All About Me suitcase.  Several other traveling books are being sent home every day.

We love to see each smiling face enter the Froggy room door.  Your children bless us everyday!!

We have had a wonderful and exciting month of October!  The first week of the month brought us fun with human and dinosaur skeletons!  We learned that both people and animals have skeletons that hold them upright and make it possible for them to move. "Dem Bones" are connected in a specific order and have joints between some of the bones to enable us to move, twist, bend, talk and eat!  We also learned that skeletons are not to be feared.  We created skeletons with spaghetti bones and Cheerio joints, we played the "Bones-No Bones Game", and learned to sing our new favorite song "Dem Bones!" 

We read about dinosaurs and learned that they are extinct.  We learned about archeologists (scientists that dig up artifacts and bones) and paleontologists (scientists that study dinosaurs bones and put them together).  We put dinosaurs (carnivores and herbivores) into our Block Center and opened an archeological site in our Sand Center where paleontologists discover dinosaur bones and recreate dinosaur skeletons!

Our letter of the week was Mm.  We danced and sang with Mr. M, listening for words that began with his sound.  We experimented with magnets and found that a magnet will only pick up metal objects that are made from iron or steel.  We added many new magnet activities to our Science Center.

The second week of the month brought us fun with pumpkins and squirrels.  We read Clifford's Picking Pumpkins and From a Seed to a Pumpkin to learn about the life cycle of a pumpkin - seed, roots/sprout, vine, blossom, fruitlet, pumpkin.  We opened a Pumpkin Pounding Center where we hammered golf tees into our pumpkin. When it was covered with tees, we set the pumpkin outside our classroom window to observe/experiment what would happen next.  We language-dictated a class book containing each child's hypothesis. We prepared and ate our own pumpkin pie, read Squirrels and Nuts to You to learn about this rodent mammal, and we recalled facts that we had learned in the books to write our own class book called How a Squirrel Uses Its Tail.  We added squirrels and their nests (dreys) to our fall mural and played the  " Squirrel in a Tree Game."  We pretended to be squirrels and tasted four kinds of nuts, voted on our favorite taste and created a bar graph to display our data.  We used this graph to answer questions about our class experiment.  Our letter of the week was Pp.  We felt how the sound of Pp feels when we make it (air on our finger) and discovered many classroom objects that begin with our new letter.  We had fun with the Pp sound as we learned the Tongue Twisters "Peter Piper" and "a purple puppy picked a pair of plump pumpkins!"

The third week of the month brought us fun with Fire Safety and Spiders.  We read Clifford the Firehouse Dog and I'm Going to Be a Firefighter to see many of the things that a firefighter does at work.  We read about the different kinds of fire vehicles and we studied Clifford's Fire Safety Rules.  We played the "Stop, Drop and Roll Game" and the "Stay Low and Go Game."  We practiced dialling 911 on our class telephone and practiced what to say to the emergency personnel.  The Aledo Volunteer Fire Department came to our parking lot for an onsite field trip.  The firefighters dressed in their  Turn Out Gear to show the children what they would look like if they came in to save them in a real fire so the children would not to be scared of the mask and air hose.  We learned to pull on, hit, or kick the firefighter in a real fire so that they know where we are (they cannot hear us as a fire is very loud).  We also got to see the fire engine up close and walk through the engine cab!  We drew a picture about our favorite thing we learned from the field trip and added it to our Thank You Book. We read Mighty Spiders, I Can Read about Spiders and The Very Busy Spider to learn about this arachnid.  We learned that spiders are very helpful to us and to gardeners and farmers as they eat many harmful insects.  We learned that some spiders hunt for their prey and some catch their prey in a web.  We now know that spiders have eight legs and usually eight eyes!  We observed pictures of the Black Widow Spider and the Fiddle Back Spider (Brown Recluse) as they are the harmful spiders in Texas.  Our letter of the week was Ff.  We played the "Flip Flop Game", went fishing with magnets, ran a float/sink experiment and learned more about sharing with friends with The Rainbow Fish book. We felt the Ff sound with our finger and discovered that it always makes the same sound.

The fourth week of the month brought us fun with Halloween and bats.  We read many books about Clifford's Halloween experiences and language- dictated our own class book called What Will You Be on Halloween?  We played the " Jack-o-Lantern Tic-Tac-Toe Game", carved and cleaned our class pumpkin,  and made decorations for our new Clifford's Haunted House Center.  We read the book Faces to recall feelings and facial expressions and then played the "Pumpkin, Pumpkin, Round and Fat" song game to turn into Jack-o-Lanterns with those expressions.  We read Bats and Night Creatures to learn about bats.  We learned that bats are also mammals and are very helpful to us as they eat insects and pollinate new foliage (Fruit Bats).  We learned that bats will not hurt us unless they think we are going to hurt them and that we never touch a bat on the ground.  We observed that bats have skeletons just like us, they have joints to help them bend their wings and to fly, they hang upside down to sleep, they are nocturnal creatures, and they hibernate or fly south to stay warm in winter.  We played the "Echolocation Game", flying like bats while using the sound waves from our mouths and the returning sound waves as they bounced off objects to our ears to fly without bumping into those objects.  Our letter of the week was Hh.  We read Clifford's Halloween Howl, played the Jack-o-Lantern numeral/object game,  ordinally sequenced pumpkin rings, felt the air on our finger from the Hh sound, and discovered that Hh always makes the same sound.  We added our carved Jack-o-Lantern to our pounding pumpkin experiment outside our class window (decomposition ).

The fifth week of the month brought us more fun with pumpkins.  We had a Pajama Party and went to the CED Pumpkin Patch to pick our very own pumpkin to take home! 

The month of November will bring us fun with pizza, food, nutrition, manners, The Little Red Hen, Thanksgiving, turkeys, thankfulness and a special Stone Soup Feast!