We started our unit on pumpkins today.  It will continue this week, skip a week (so we can learn about the farm) and then pick up again after our trip to the apple orchard/pumpkin patch.

We began our day by taking a look at our new pocket chart poem: (One of the children noticed it and so it seemed like a great place to start!)

Then we talked about the letters that we would look for this week in our Pocket Chart Station:

After that, we took a picture walk through and then read our new Big Book:

I use the Shared Reading with Big Books book from the Building Blocks authors, to help me guide my lessons.  After you use this book enough, you come back to it for the stories that are in it, but also to get ideas to use with other books that are not in it.

We then read some read alouds:

Later in the day we started a new Predictable Chart, called, ” A pumpkin is…” and 1/2 of the class filled in their sentences today.

We also completed our pattern block pumpkins and graph today, so I will photograph those tomorrow–I have to get a bulletin board to put them on! 🙂

Something else fun that happened today was that I was able to “share the pen” with some of my Kinder. kids.  It doesn’t usually happen this early in the year, but they were so ready, and I could tell from watching them, who knew how to find specific words where.  You know the kind of assessment you do that isn’t research based?  More like gut feeling based?!?!  So here are some pictures of my assistants helping me write the Morning Message!

In this particular message, we  did a letter hunt for two letters, F (green) and A (blue).  We counted the number of letters (red) and words (orange) in the message, and then we looked for “rainbow words” (yellow bubbles)–our sight words. We’ve also done punctuation hunts, capital letters, lowercase letters, spaces, sight words without looking, sentences, patterns, double letters, blends, words we should know automatically, words on our Word Wall, days of the week, months of the year, seasons, weather, specials classes, names, and many more.  I am diligent about doing a Morning Message EVERYDAY!