Jack-o'-Lantern Labeling

Whew! Finally caught up to all the great bloggers out there doing some form of labeling activity. I believe I first caught the labeling bug here from Mrs. Lee's Kindergarten and was inspired Jennifer's labeling mats at First Grade Blue Skies.

Naturally we labeled Ms. Bueno with sticky-notes first. Man, those things didn't stay on at all! They kept falling off but we got the idea. 

Are you expecting a picture?

HA! I didn't have a label for "third arm" or "parent helper"! ;)

When that was over we took the strategy to my illustration of a jack-o'-lantern. 

Now... I DID have a picture, but I left my camera at school...

'doh!

Then I passed out a quick labeling page to practice. No great shakes, but it certainly helped them feel successful. Of course it looks whacko below, but it was kinda cute, I swear!

Have you gotten the PrintClearly font yet? The dashed version is great for handwriting practice and it's what most of my homemade worksheets like this one are created with.

I'm pleased that this mini-lesson went so well! Tomorrow we'll take the same idea in our writing as we describe how to carve a jack-o'-lantern! 

Boo!

Did I scare you???

I mean, I haven't been around much lately... you would've thought I was a GHOST!

Well, I'm glad you found me today! I whipped up some quick patterns cards to mimic the great ones I found at PreKinders here (scroll down to the bottom).

So get out your Halloween erasers from Target to extend these patterns!

When Life Gives You Lemons...

make... a pumpkin patch?

So I'm at school on Sunday getting ready for our pumpkin unit when I get a phone call from one of my team members. We had a field trip scheduled today (a Monday!) and she was calling to tell me...

they CANCELLED on us!

We were heading to a community pumpkin patch and they didn't have any small pumpkins to sell the kiddos because their shipment didn't come in! We collected the money, got the permission forms signed, sack lunches were already deducted from the kid's accounts, BUSES were already reserved (so hard to come by in our district!)... What do we do?!

We made our OWN pumpkin patch.

No hay bales... no scarecrows... no wooden-cut-out-photo-ops... but A LOT of fun!

We have a very quick thinker on our team that ran to Lowe's during our planning and FILLED her suv with pumpkins. We unloaded them in the field by the playground we were having lunch at and viola! Makeshift pumpkin patch.

Haha! She couldn't see out the back! 

Best of all, we put our heads together and came up with some clever rotations so that each class would have a turn to choose a pumpkin.

Mrs. Yandell graphed what jack-o-latern face each class wants to carve (pictures soon).

I paraphrased Pumpkin Circle to talk about the plant cycle (it has such great photos of pumpkin flowers!)

Mrs. Baros helped the children choose a pumpkin and Ms. Alvarado helped them organize a pumpkin rolling race!

It was a complete success! I am so proud of my team for pulling it together.