The Hallo-Wiener

The Hallo-Wiener is one of my favorite Halloween books.  It is so funny and the kids really enjoyed reading it.  The basic story line is about a wiener dog who dresses up as a hot dog for Halloween.  His dog friends make fun of him but at the end of Trick-or-Treating he ends up saving them from a scary monster!  Great story - please read it!

To go with reading the story we did this adorable little wiener dog project.  The kids wrote and illustrated about their favorite part of story.  I was surprised by all the different parts they chose.  They definitely had many different favorite parts - which just shows how much they enjoyed the story.

There were other comprehension pages that went along with the story.  One was to design your own costume for Oscar.  They LOVED that (and of course they were super creative)!

Click on the link to take you to my TPT store so you can get your own copy of The Hallo-Wiener activity.

Go for the Gold!

This week we had a special guest visit our school - Becca Murray.  This summer Becca participated in the 2016 Rio Paralympics where she and her team won the gold medal in wheelchair basketball.  She is a local member of our community and even went to our school, County Line, when she was in elementary.   

She spoke to the students about following their dreams and working hard to overcome obstacles in order to accomplish their goals.  The students really enjoyed getting to see her gold medal!  

What a cool experience and a great message to all the students!

Beginning of the Year

So September came and went before I even noticed!  We have been BUSY, BUSY in our classroom lately learning all our new routines. My favorite new routine has to be our Kindness Challenge.  I stumbled across it on Instagram this summer and instantly knew we had to try it out this year.  

Every week we flip the card to see what our "challenge" will be for the week.  It is a great way to start a discussion about different ways to be kind to one another.  

This week I found a great book in our book order "What Does it Mean to be Kind".  It was a sweet little story about things that you can do to be kind to others.  

Today our challenge was:

It could be my favorite challenge to date because the class did a great job interviewing each other to find out 5 new things about each other.  After they were done we all sat in a circle with our partner and shared one thing we learned.  

We have also been doing all things Apple (in September) and love these activities by Linda Kamp.

We do a lot of acrostic poems at the beginning of the year because the kid get the hang of them quickly and they always turn out cute.  

We also learned a little bit about each other by making Tree-Mendous Things About Me