Pumpkin Book Reports and Story Elements

Oct 31, 2019
3 min read

We have had a fun couple of weeks as we have worked our way through October and into November already!!! I can't believe we are already finished with our first quarter...and winter is closing in!!!

The past couple of weeks have been packed full of opportunities to learn about and apply our knowledge of text elements. Thank you for your participation at home with our Pumpkin Book Reports. This is one of my favorite projects we do each year.... although it is hard to pick favorites when we do so many fun things in first grade.

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While you worked at home on creating masterpieces, we worked at school on writing story elements (i.e. author, illustrator, main characters, facts, etc) onto candy pieces. Those were then placed into trick-or-treat bags and set on display with the final projects. All week, during Halloween Week, students, staff and parents were able to go trick-or-treating for information about each of the books on display!

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THEY ALL TURNED OUT SO GREAT!!!

This past Wednesday, we took some time for Pumpkin Investigations.

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We observed how our pumpkins looked, made predictions on whether or not they would sink or float, measured them and even cut the pumpkins open to count seeds. We worked hard to sort seeds into piles of ten for easier counting. It made for an exciting afternoon!

On Thursday, in addition to our normal morning routine, we fit in a trip to the wax museum, a Halloween Hike on the amazingly decorated Nature Trail and an afternoon of Spooky STEM.

Our PTO did a terrific job this year of decorating the entire Nature Trail with spooky and fun Halloween Decor. Although mother nature did not really cooperate, we had a blast!

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Back in the warmth of our classroom, we enjoyed a lovely sweet treat (thank you for the donations of juices to go with our snacks) and enjoyed planning, designing, building, and redesigning spider bridges and candy towers!

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This week, we also had our first get-together with our fourth grade reading buddies from Mrs. Simons' class.

We were able to listen to a fun Halloween story from Mrs. Simons and then spent time creating spooky Halloween ghost stories with our new buddies, who wrote them down for everyone to keep!

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We have had a fun time making some story comparisons the past week between the stories Stone Soup and Bone Soup.

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We had the chance to read these stories and have discussions about how they were similar and different. We were also able to discuss various story elements including setting, characters and plot for each story. It is always fun getting to read multiple versions of similar stories (this is what we are doing with folktales during our Reading Knowledge literacy block too)! The class favorite was by far Bone Soup, and as promised, here is the recipe from the story on how you can make the bone-chillingly good Bone Soup at home!

I am excited to share more of your child's learning with you throughout the upcoming month. We are moving into science and will be learning about space, continuing work on addition and subtraction strategies in math, completing our work on folktales from different lands and so much more. Be on the lookout next week for an exciting first grade Thanksgiving Tradition!

As always, you can check the homepage here for a quick look at important dates for this month!