It may not surprise you to learn that I got very few good photos of the students in their actual Halloween costumes and that most of the ones I did get are blurry. Students were very excited yesterday! Please feel free to send me your photos, especially if you got some good shots during the parade. :)
In lieu of that, I thought I would post about some of the pre-Halloween learning that happened around our class pumpkins.
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| Here's an example of a daily message. Many of our daily messages reinforce curriculum, like this one does. Please also note the missing letters, which we have students fill in to build sound/letter recognition. |
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| Here's a recent overview of our science centre contents. You can see the charts of foods that grow, and the pumpkin's life cycle, with students' drawings added, as well as our uncarved pumpkin, celery food colouring experiment, and various leaves and stones brought in by students to examine. |
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| Here's our chart, examining the difference between 5 and 11. Some students had a hard time figuring out which number was higher, so we modelled it by counting, graphing and drawing. |
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| We tried to get students to create pumpkin faces out of blocks, but most were more inspired by Picasso than we'd hoped. This group used one of our Halloween stories to help them create a face. |
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| To model what students saw inside the pumpkin, we had them do some art. On the left is a particularly creative JK interpretation. On the right is a more restrained creation, with some writing. We provided pumpkin shapes, leaves, stems, string, pumpkin seeds, and pom-poms and let them go to town. |
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| Gabby's seeds are not so much inside, but there are 24 of them, as she's written on the leaf (pom-poms were not included in the count). |
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| Theo just really liked the big pom-poms. |
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| Here students are beginning to explore whether pumpkins sink or float. |
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| Some students continue the experiment while others go off to find new things to test and look through the magnifying glass some more. |
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| Here is the inevitable pumpkin soup. Note the creative use of the pine branch from the science centre as a whisk. |
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| Unexpected learning happens through drama as well. The rubber figurines sunk, so the students decided to use the wooden block as a raft to save them. |
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| Ms. Fish gets students to help her draw the face on the pumpkin before cutting it. |
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| Students stand in front of the graph that helped us choose which face we should carve. |
So there you go. Today is Ms. Fish's final day in our classroom and her warm presence will be sorely missed. Many thanks are due to her for taking on pumpkin carving in particular.
In November, I hope to explore point of view in our stories, measurement in math and structures in science, but as these pictures show, a lot of learning happens outside any path I might try to tread.
