Kindergarten in October

As I wait not-so-patiently for EduBlogs to finish the latest upgrades (I still prefer typing up my blog on their template and then cutting and pasting it here, sorry Blogger!), I've realized that although it's only been a month and a half since I returned to teaching, I need to update my blogroll again. I'm also feeling inspired by the change of season and our upcoming Halloween activities~perhaps I'll change the header too!

Let's catch up, shall we?

*****
October in the classroom: pumpkins (math: estimation, measurement, comparing size, counting seeds), spiders and our bodies (science/math: identifying body parts, comparing/contrasting, developing vocabulary, living things in our world, how spiders help us, how we keep our bodies safe and healthy), fire safety (health/social studies: how to stay safe, fire prevention, community helpers, family)...reading is fun with poems and stories that help us with vocabulary, sight words, environmental print, sentence structure, expression, and even MATH with counting, ordinal numbers, etc.:

Five Little Pumpkins

Five little pumpkins sitting on a gate,
the first one said "Oh my it's getting late."
The second one said "There are witches in the air."
The third one said "But we don't care!"
The fourth one said "Let's run and run and run!"
The fifth one said I'm ready for some fun!"
Whoo-hoo went the wind and *out* went the lights
and the five little pumpkins rolled out of sight.

*****
~Praising children is BACK (not that it ever left my classroom), thank goodness! Open Education shares Brain Research Confirms Importance of Praise for Young Children:

The overall findings were summarized in Science Daily thus: “Eight-year-olds learn primarily from positive feedback (’Well done!’), whereas negative feedback (’Got it wrong this time’) scarcely causes any alarm bells to ring.”

Ultimately, it appears that 8-year-olds are simply not able to process negative feedback very well while 12-year-olds can actually use negative feedback in a way that helps them learn from their mistakes. The young adult group was able to do the same, with the findings indicating that the older age group could learn from their mistakes more efficiently than the pre-adolescent group.

The results also reiterate some long-standing knowledge from the field of child development. Experts in that field have long postulated that young children respond much better to reward than they do to punishment. (emphasis mine)

~Amazing Mae shares the cutest footprint ghosts (I'm going to ask my fifth grade buddy class to also make these so my students can make patterns for math and sort the ghosts by size!)...

~Hostess With the Mostess shares paper pumpkin ornaments...
*****
I hope you have a GREAT week!