Pumpkins and Spiders and Habitats, Oh My!

Haha.  Sorry, I made myself giggle.  My kids think I'm SO cheesy.  Who am I kidding, I am SO cheesy!

First:  Habitats!

So this week we started a unit on Habitats.  Super fun, I love teaching about animals and their habitats and their life cycles.  I think my kids really enjoyed this week too.  We started with reading about each habitat in our books (which was SUPER boring, but necessary to get our background info).  Then we made a graphic organizer about them!

Our awesome Graphic Organizer!  With my yucky chalk board in the background!

Day 2  we worked with our table buddies and each table was assigned a habitat to illustrate.  They did a great job!  Unfortunately I dropped the ball and didn't get any pictures.  :(

Day 3 we made Habitat books.  I've included the template- I printed it single sided so that on one side they could write the words about the habitat and on the other they could include an illustration.

Here is the Habitat Book.

I forgot to rotate this before uploading it and I'm feeling lazy at the moment, so it's sideways.

 I also sent home packets for them to complete for an end of unit Habitat Project.  I'll post that next week after I have some pictures.

Next up:  Spiders!

The awesome second grade teacher who "lives" across the hall from me put some super cute spider projects up in the hallway....so of course I had to steal borrow her idea!  I adjusted it a bit - instead of it being a math project ours was rhyming!  We made word webs with rhyming words, then glued them in the middle of our spiders!  I think they came out pretty cute.  I didn't get any close-ups, but you can see them later in this post on my wall.

Last but not least:  Pumpkins!

I'm so excited.  Like squeal like a small child excited....Next week.  On Friday.  We are going to the Pumpkin Farm!  I've never been to a pumpkin farm!  They don't exist in SW Florida.  But here in Illinois- there are tons!  I'm a pumpkin nut.  Pumpkin muffins, pumpkin pie, pumpkin bars, pumpkin cupcakes....I hoard cans of pumpkin this time of year.  So needless to say I'm VERY excited for this field trip.

In order to prepare we've started reading about pumpkins and including pumpkin stories in our curriculum.

The first story we read was The Legend of Spookley the Square Pumpkin by Joe Troiana.  I love this story, it's a great "it's good to be different" story.  We then made our own Spookley pumpkins and then wrote about them!

Some were square

Some were round.

And some are triangles!

Some even had hats and feet!

Here is one along with it's writing Project.

 The kiddos really enjoyed this!

The next Pumpkin story we read was Sixteen Runaway Pumpkins by Diane Ochiltree.

I used one of the math pages from this Halloween Unit by Rachelle over at What The Teacher Wants.  Her Halloween unit ROCKS definitely check out her TPT store.

Here is our finished products all posted in the hallway!

Our rhyming web spiders and some of our runaway pumpkin math problems.

Our Spookley pumpkins and more of our runaway pumpkin math!

It was a really fun week!  I'm excited that next week is a 4 day week and one of those days is our Field Trip!!

And just a quick photo update on Dexter!  He's getting big, and just shed for the first time!  His colors are really pretty.