Pumpkins, Character Traits, Landforms and more...

It's time to recap the week with Doodlebugs Learning with Five for Friday.

 We are learning about character traits.  We learned that character traits describe a character on the inside.



We used the mentor text Amazing Grace. We made an anchor chart and listed her traits. I was so proud of my first graders!  They came up with words like "curious", "creative" and "determined", to name a few.  Wow!  I was impressed and since I was being observed for this lesson so was my assistant principal.

We used Amy Labrasciano's All-Star Character Traits to create these fabulous bodices in which we created our own character traits.  I love this and I love her store!

Didn't they do such a good job?  Clearly, self-esteem is not an issue in our class.  Tee-hee.

About each month we have an activity day that centers around a theme.  WE had Pumpkin Activity Day today.  Here's a snapshot of what we did:



6 ways to use the colors of candy corn.

pumpkin strip mobiles

Investigate a pumpkin and complete a pumpkin lapbook.  Estimate and

measure circumference, predict and experiment with float/sink, depict the

life cycle of a pumpkin, measure height with snap cubes and describe

with adjectives.  The pumpkin lapbook is available in my store.



I have a few students who are Hindu so we learned about Diwali which began this week with a close read from my Close Reading: Holidays product.

We are also learning about landforms.  We made a flipbook of the various landforms.

We had another busy week of math workshop.  Here are the activities we enjoyed this week:

This fun dice game from Teach with Laughter had us roll a dice and add 1, add 2, add 3 and then subtract 1, subtract 2, etc.

My "high flyers" worked hard on elapsed time.

We are working really hard on open response questions in our math journals.  This is a big push from my district right now as research shows that students are struggling with this concept. I am currently working on making open response questions on sticky labels that can be just added into their notebooks.

We also practiced combinations of ten using ten pennies.  We placed some pennies in our left hand, some in our right and created number models (8+2=10).

We also played this game from Teach with Laughter in which we turned over a number card and the amount shown in a ten frame, just like "Memory".

Whew!  What a busy week!  Bring on the weekend because next week is filled with parent/teacher conferences, Halloween and professional Development!

How was your week?