Blends, Elections and Turkeys!

What a week it has been!

I am very happy to be celebrating our Veterans with this three day weekend, I know I need it as much as my kiddos!

So what did we do this week.... Blends, Elections and Turkeys BABY! Take a gander...

First up blends:

This week Treasures introduced r and s blends. Combined with our l blends we did a few weeks ago the kids were rockin and rollin! My para was our for the week so my kiddos had to do an independent center... GASP! Don't worry, they handled their first one really well, I was proud :)

They worked on my Fall Blends literacy center

don't look at the backwards b :(  We are still working on it... I was busy with my small group so this is the only pic I have... but there are a bunch of sets for them to work on each kiddo did two sets

You can pick up my Fall Blends center game HERE!

We also did a blend slider activity... I love sliders :) They make things so much more interesting!

The kiddos put their sliders together ( I pre-sliced the openings for them) and then made a series of words, determining them to be nonsense or real

You can pick up my Blend Slider HERE and HERE (make sure to get both to make the complete slider)!

We also finished our election unit this week, culminating with an in class election on Tuesday. We are lucky enough that our school cafeteria is used as a polling place, so we got the chance to tour the polling area. Ruth, the poll worker, explained the process of visiting the polls and what each poll worker does. Then we headed back to class, assigned poll worker jobs and went to voting...

Check in- one kiddo highlighted names and checked IDs,  the other handed out the ballots

Voting booths, courtesy of our math privacy boards :)

Tearing the voting stub and dropping the ballot in the box. Ruth, the poll-worker was kind enough to give me "I voted" stickers for all of my kids, so after they dropped in their ballot each on got a sticker :) They were beaming!

The kids voted two at a time while the others worked on their Thanksgiving place mats. All in all it took us a half hour to get through the voting process. I will be doing this again, for sure!

And as if the hasn't been enough going on we have been working on our class turkey also :) Each kiddo took a blank feather home and decorated it in any way that they wanted...

I took this photo on Tuesday when I had only a few kids return their feathers (they had all week to work on them). I'll snap another shot Tuesday with the complete turkey :)

Okay, that's enough! Thanks for sticking with me! Have a wonderful Monday!

Happy November! (w/ math freebies)

We made it!  October was crazy, but I made it through. While, I love all of the bats, ghosts and pumpkins, Halloween and October just aren't my fave...

But November and December ... L.O.V.E.!!!

So we kicked off November with a bang these last two days, take a look :)

I made a few new math tub activities centered on addition using the count on strategy:

BUMP... my kids had never played this game. They thought it was pretty cool!

+1 Cover Up... can I just say that I use those dollar store mini plastic cups for everything!

Turkey True and False

You can pick up these math activities HERE, but take note: there are no recording sheets. We use this as our "Friday Free Choice" time... only they have no choice, because I tell them where to go and what activity to... Oh well... they love it anyway and it lasts a quick 30min, two stations 12 min each with 6 min to clean up :)!  I rarely have the kids using recording sheets during this time, because I walk around and check in on each group and recording skills/participation.

We also dug in on Cara Carroll's Pint Sized Presidential Unit. I am so glad I own this! It is worth every penny...

We started with If we were president and completed the craftivity

so cute!

On Tuesday we will hold our election and the kids are already buzzing about it!

Have a great week :)