November has Flown by!

Wow!! November is almost over already!  How did this happen!?

Well here's a recap of our month...

First off, we celebrated Veteran's Day by learning about the Veterans who serve/have served our wonderful country!

If you didn't know already, my big brother, Adam, is proudly serving our country in the United States Navy.  He's been in the Navy for over 10 years.  He is currently serving in Lemoore, California as a Legalman.  He did two tours in Afghanistan, and lived in Japan during his ten years.



Anywho, we set ourselves up to interview him over Facetime.  The kiddos wrote their questions to ask Adam during the interview.  Some questions included, "What is your Navy name?" and "Where have you been in the Navy?"

The day of Veteran's Day, we were very excited to video chat with Adam (aka Mr. Schulze).  Sidenote: the kids got such a big kick out of "Mr. Schulze"...I'm pretty sure they think everyone, including my family calls me Ms. Schulze haha!  Anyways, after a few technical difficulties, we got video chat up and running!  Thank you Google Hangout!


We invited two other first grade classes who were free and any admin that were available.  The interview was a success!  The kids learned a lot,  and I think my brother really enjoyed the experience.  The best part was after the interview, the kids sang him a Thank You song!  Oh My Gee!! Such a sweet moment!  I wish I could figure out how to upload videos to share that with you! 

That afternoon, to wrap up our lessons, the kiddos wrote thank you letters to Veterans.  Some kiddos chose family members who have passed away, and some even wrote to Adam.  Very meaningful day!

Another thing to happen in November was the devastating attacks on Paris.  We talked a little about what happened.  The kiddos created French flags and cut them into hearts.  We hung them up in the window with a french sentence "Paris, nos coeurs sont avec vous."  which translates to, "Paris, our hearts are with you."

We ended the month with learning about the first Thanksgiving.  The kiddos loved learning about how different things were in the past.  Here are a few things we learned about during the week!

On a personal note, I started off my Thanksgiving break attending the wedding of one of my first teacher friends!  It was a great time to catch up with former co-workers and see a beautiful wedding at Houma's House Plantation in Louisiana!  

       

Congrats Haley and Aaron!

I hope you have a wonderful and relaxing Thanksgiving with friends and family!

Gobble Gobble!

Pumpkin Day!

Sorry that this post is a little late, but I wanted to share our pumpkin explorations with you for Pumpkin Day!

First off, we had book character day and Miss Frizzle came to teach our class! (Excuse the pumpkin prep mess behind me!)

We had parents come to help us with our investigations, and I don't think the day would have gone as smoothly!  I want to give a HUGE shout out to my parent volunteers!! Thank you!!

So let me explain the morning:

We had 11+ different stations for exploration throughout all different content areas all related to pumpkins...of course!

We measured the circumference, weight, and height of our pumpkins.  We made predictions before we measured.

We tested the buoyancy of our pumpkins to see if they will sink or float.  Did you know that pumpkins float!?  Even the big ones! Who would have thought?

We tested if the force of a blow dryer would make our pumpkins roll.  Sadly, our blow dryer was not a strong enough force to make the pumpkin roll.

We drew and wrote about the life cycle of a pumpkin!

We drew and labeled the parts of a pumpkin!

We played a math game with adding dice and finding matching tally marks with pumpkins!

We put together and read a poem about pumpkins!

We sorted noun, verb, and adjective pumpkin cards by type of word.

We even got our faces painted with pumpkins!  What a fun morning!!

No pumpkin day would be complete without counting the seeds! We figured out that it's easier to count all the seeds if we put them in groups of 10.  Did you know there were 295 seeds in that pumpkin?  None of our predictions were correct!

Well that was our morning! Whew! We were busy! 

In the afternoon, we had an unwelcome visitor! Can you believe that the Candy Corn Bandit stole our candy corn and sent us on a wild goose chase to find where he left it!

We had to follow his clues and use our reading detective brains to make inferences about where the next clue could be!

He ended up leaving it right back in our classroom! Sneaky bandit! 

Sorry, we were on such a mission to find our candy corn, we didn't get any pictures of this activity. 😔

Thank you for reading!