Beginning of pumpkins and last week's shape monsters...

This week we began our pumpkin unit and boy oh boy am I excited!! We used our pumpkin "ballots" and voted this morning on how our pumpkin will be carved. It is looking like we will have triangle eyes, a triangle nose, and a semi circle mouth. The kiddos (and I) are super pumped about it.

Another thing that we create every year at this time is our pumpkin life cycle activity I found from A-Z Teacher Stuff. After reading several trade books on the life cycle of a pumpkin and discussing it, we use the handout below and color in the pictures. We cut out the pictures and then glue them closed onto green yarn to represent the vine of the pumpkin life cycle. Then we create our pumpkins. Today we started painting our pumpkins. 

 

We use non-waxy paper plates and paint them orange. Once the orange has dried, we cut a little hole at the top of one of them and then staple them together. After that, we paint black lines on our pumpkins but as you can see, we have not gotten that far yet!!

Another thing that I wanted to share with ya'll was one of our favorite Halloween activities that we did last year, our Spooky Shape Monsters. I apologize that I can not for the life of me remember which adorable blog I originally saw this on- so if you recognize it PLEASE let me know so I can give credit where credit is due!! I unfortunately did not come up with this super cute idea on my own. Anyway, these shape monsters are glyphs- as if we don't do enough of these in my class already anyway!

 

  

Another little tip that I am sure many of you all do already anyway is to either cut your die cuts out of scrapbook paper or to mount your die cuts onto scrapbook paper. This always adds a little extra touch that makes everything just a little bit cuter :)

 

Spider, Bat and Engagement Update

Well first let me start by saying thank you so much to all you sweet bloggers for your congratulations. You just added to the excitement of my already very exciting weekend :) 

I am very fortunate that I work at a small school where we feel like a family. When I walked in to school on Monday morning there were many little surprises for me to celebrate my engagement. One of my best teacher friends made all of my students mini cupcakes with rings on them so they could celebrate the engagement too-- with their own rings. The boys were too cute, turning their rings around so the diamonds weren't showing since "boy rings don't have diamonds". 

This friend brought in lots of other treats to share in the teacher's lounge with cute little cards and these cute little napkins for everyone:

 

I also got this precious balloon from another teacher friend:

Gotta love working with all women right?? They all were so excited for me, which just added to my excitement!

While at work the past few days (while trying very hard to keep wedding planning off the brain!) we have worked more on our spiders and bats unit. 

We also finished our bat craftivities but haven't hung them up yet and I wanted to give ya'll the full effect :) I figured you could wait one more day...

I hope you're all having a great week :)

I'm ENGAGED!! And a little peek at what we did last week

Well oh my goodness have the past few days been crazy or what?! Let me start by saying that I just recently got engaged to my boyfriend of three years-- yay!!!! We are both soooo excited being the overachieving workaholic that I am, I am already starting planning!! 

But before all the excitement of the engagement, there was a little unit called Spiders and Bats that we were all wrapped up in this week. We also did Abby Mullins' unit "The Candy Corn Bandit" and oh my word my kiddos were loving it. My little sweeties were bringing in homemade "Candy Corn Bandit Traps" this year!! I certainly didn't have that last year when we did this unit! One little boy even brought in homemade quicksand and candy ( to bait him with and draw him towards the quicksand), Needless to say, this week flew by and I can't believe it is already the weekend. Here are a few pictures from our week:

 

Our Candy Corn Bandits and we made a "WANTED" poster for him. All of the "big kids" in our school are helping us look for him in order to get our reward :)

 These are the spider craftivities from my Spiders and Bats unit. As soon as we are done making the bats, I want to swap these out and hang up our spiders on the window with our spider webs!

 

Here we are playing the "Bat Cave" game from the unit. 

 

And here are a few of our finished graphs!

I hope you are all having a great weekend!! 

I'm Throwing A Sale!

I don't know about ya'll but I have been getting sooo into the Halloween spirit lately. I have got Halloween on the brain 24/7! We are going a little Halloween crazy in my room right now with decorations EVERYWHERE! I can't believe I haven't taken pictures yet to show all of you. In order to help spread my Halloween cheer, everything in my TPT store is 20% off from now until Friday at midnight!!

Maybe you can all spend the extra few bucks on a pumpkin spice latte or something ;)

Spiders and Bats Unit

I am VERY close to being finished with my Spooky Spiders and Bats Unit and will probably be posting it on Sunday. 

I have noticed on a lot of blogs lately that bloggers are asking for suggestions of what to put in their units. What a brilliant idea!! Is there anything that you all would like to see in my spiders and bats unit? 

So far there are:

Several writing prompts 

A venn diagram

A survey with tallies and a graph (similar to my colors unit survey if you purchased that)

 A game board for centers with reading number words 

A spider craftivity with reading and following directions

A bat craftivity with reading and following directions

A list of spider and bat books for a class graph

If there is anything else you would like to see in this unit let me know ASAP so I can add it in!