Halloween...or not

Here are my weekend finds from the dollar section at Target...

I'm not a huge Halloween person. I let my kids trick or treat, we do trunk or treat at school and I help at the trunk or treat at my church, but for a bunch of reasons, I don't celebrate it in my classroom. I love dressing up, and I always do for our school trunk or treat, but that's about it. Well, of course there's also the candy! But I got totally sucked in to the cute monsters. So I decided I would use it to my advantage this week in the classroom. We're reading "The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything" and of course "Where the Wild Things Are". And "Go Away Big Green Monster". We're going to use them to talk about how monsters aren't real, and I'm going to try to capitalize on use of imagination this week. I'm using one of the monster containers to do a grammar noun, adjective, adverb and verb sort game. And remember the metal shaving/magnet pictures on the left? My grandparents had one, and so now I totally have a soft spot for them! I thought they were SO COOL! So I'm going to use them as a game, probably with grammar or math. I'll put them in teams, and for every right answer you get to put the hair on the monster! Whoever's monster has a head of hair first wins! They could be a writing tool, too!  The Frankenberry cereal is for adding and subtracting. I put a unit on TPT and Teacher's Notebook of some of the material I'm planning to use. So check it out if you need something cheap and quick!

 And we just may need to make these!


Have a great week!
 
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Standards and a Pumpkinpalooza freebie

How many of you post your standards in your room? How many of you match up your assignments to a standard, and how do you do it? Is it in your lesson plan? Your curriculum map?  

Teaching in a private school is different, in so many ways. I come from a private, SMALL college and I feel like I'm playing catch-up on the standards train. I'm trying to learn, though. And I especially want  to learn what's expected of you public school teachers. I want to make sure I'm up to speed. I REALLY appreciate any information you take the time to share!!! 

So here in Arizona it's COOL today!!!!! Fall weather!!!  And it might even be cloudy and RAINY!!! WOOHOO!!!!! So here's some pictures of our week (actually 2 weeks ago already- I am so in awe of all of you who blog on a regular basis.) of Pumpkinpalooza!

 
Here we are seeing if our pumpkins float, weighing and measuring,  and playing Pin the Nose on the Pumpkin after we wrote adjectives about the pumpkin on the square post- its that became it's nose. I used some cute pumpkin stuff from Cara Caroll and my own $1 unit. The Pin the Nose game came from Target or the Dollar Store- I don't remember which.  We baked 4 different pumpkin treats, graphed about them, did grammar, math and reading activities. I think my daughter, my biggest critic, even thought it was "pretty fun". Although I also heard "I thought it would be funner" come out of her mouth at one point. Sheesh. High maintenance much? Listen friend, do you know how many times I baked pumpkin bread in first grade? NEVER! Teaching your own child is not always the Maxwell House commercial you think it's gonna be. But it does make it easier to post pictures of kids! (: Here's a couple pages of my unit for you to try.

Have a great day and thank you for any comments about the standards!

 
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