October 25th

We did a book focus this week on the fun Halloween story Big Pumpkin. You can watch the story HERE on Youtube.  This is one of my favourite Halloween stories.  It lends itself nicely to introducing the students to the elements of a story. As well, it is an easy story to do a retell in the form of a reader's theatre.  We had so much fun with this!

Before we read the story, the students used their prediction skills to guess which character was going to be able to pull out the pumpkin. We created a graph.  Once we read the story, they all found out that they guessed wrong - all the characters worked together to pull out the pumpkin!

After reading the story to the children, I introduced the READING ROPE.  This is a tool that we will use all year to help us identify the parts of the story: 

House = Setting 

Kids =  Characters 

Knot = Problem,

Bow = Problem Solved 

B, M, E = Beginning, Middle, End

Students completed their page about the setting and the characters.

We sequenced the story and discussed where the beginning was, where the middle started, and what happened in the end.

We had so much fun retelling the story by doing a reader's theatre! Everyone had a role and some lines and they did such a good job with the voices of the characters.  Even the audience had some lines to say!

The characters are laughing at the bat because the bat was small and they didn't think he could help at all. But the bat had an idea - let't pull the pumpkin out together!

Here is a quick video of the characters working together to pull out the pumpkin.

At the very end of it all, the students drew about what their 

favourite part of the story was.

We did some pumpkin writing and used a predictable chart to help us write a sentence:

We discussed and watched a really neat video about the life cycle of a pumpkin, which you can view HERE.  Then we drew to show the life cycle.

We worked with our sight words and created sentences about pumpkins:

The students were introduced to the second component of Daily 5: Word Work.  This is when the students have a chance to practice the new words they are reading (sight word practice).  They do all sorts of centres that related to letters and words, such as making words with playdough, magnets, salt trays, wiki stix, Boogie Boards, rainbow writing, stamping, and more.   This is usually one of the students' favourite parts of the Daily 5 because it is very interactive.

Here is a sneak peek at our awesome Christmas card art we made for the RBES Christmas Card Fundraiser.  They were so careful with the painting and did SUCH a fantastic job!