Five for Friday: Apples!

It's FALL! The leaves are beautiful, the boots (and boot socks) are being worn once again, and we are learning all about apples. Here are a few happenings from our week! Thanks Kacey from Doodle Bugs Teaching for hosting my favorite linky!

Apples galore! At the beginning of this week students were invited to bring an apple to school.

 (Confession, I bought the Golden Delicious and Granny Smith apples. It's not much fun graphing all one color of apple.)

We are studying different kind of graphs in math, so we made a real graph with the apples and recorded the results in the form of individual bar graphs.

We also had a special apple-loving guest leave a mysterious note for us when we arrived at school this morning.

They guessed it - Johnny Appleseed! He (aka: our vice principal) visited our classroom and told us all about planting apple orchards across the country. He also told us to be on the lookout for his hat - he couldn't remember where he left it!

Eat an apple, 

Save the core,

Plant the seeds,

And grow some more!

I think we are getting the hang of cutting circles out of squares! These sequencing books turned out so cute!

Our favorite apple game this week was "10 Red Apples". That sneaky worm was sooo sneaky... he gave us practice identifying teen numbers and all we thought we were doing was having fun!

Check out how to play this game HERE.

Hiding behind the twelve!

This is a picture of my classroom dramatic play castle. Sometimes it's a just a castle, other times a space station... it's whatever we imagine it to be.

Earlier this week I overhead that my darling girls had turned it into a baby hospital. How sweet! Until I overheard.. "My mom says your bum hurts when you have a baby..." I intercepted (before other details emerged) with the grand idea of a vet clinic. Usually the vet center props come out during our community helpers unit but drastic times...

Almost every day this week a concerned parent or child does a double take. One parent gasped when she dropped off her daughter.We've had some good laughs over it! This new doorstop was definitely worth the $10!

Another source of laughter this week has been Mr. Monkey. He's one of the goofiest puppets I inherited from the previous kindergarten teacher. I decided his long arms were perfect for s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g out the sounds in CVC words. I'm trying to integrate short activities that work on phonemic awareness between reading group rotations. (At the beginning of the year I pull all groups to the rug after each rotation for a quick activity before starting the next rotation. It takes longer, but this helps pull the focus back in before releasing again for independent work. Eventually, we will transition from one rotation to the next seamlessly.)

Chillin' after a long day of helping the kinders sound out words.

Mr. Monkey s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-s out the sounds in a word (while I stretch out his crazy long arms) "S.....I.....P" and the class shouts out "SIP" as Mr. Monkey claps his hands together. Mr. Monkey has done such a good job modeling for us that we are ready to move on to using Slinkys to stretch out the sounds ourselves.

The Rhyming King is another puppet my kids ask about: "Will the rhyming king visit today?" Click on the post HERE to learn about the King who "love to rhyme... all the time".

Be sure to head over to the link-up to see what everyone else has been up to this week!

Enjoy your weekend!