Pumpkin Patch

My friend (a kindergarten teacher down the hall) and I both love to have our studens experience a pumpkin patch in the fall.  It's a great opportunity to promote lessons that practice fall vocabulary, science concepts, math concepts.

This year and last year, we have not been able to take our annual field trip to the local pumpkin patch due to Covid restrictions, so we decided to create a mini-version on our playground with things that we had on hand.  I had the plastic barn, pvc scarecrows, and wagons.  She had the large pumpkins, hay bales and decorative pumpkins and signs.  We asked the parents of our students to donate $3 so each child could pick a pumpkin to use for our math and science lessons and that pumpkin will go home with their child.

While we didn't get to see the farm animals or take a hayride, the students DID get to have some of the experiences of the pumpkin patch and they will get to complete all of the lessons with their very own pumpkin. (We are using some of these activities from Oh Miss Jill on Teachers Pay Teachers.)

(We've also moved our scarecrows to a new spot for next week and one of our literature selections is The Old Lady Who is Not Afraid of Anything.  The children will use our classroom dress up clothes to dress and re-dress the scarecrows to their own liking!  This is perfect for my class because many of them are working on labeling items and/or identifying items in a category.  Next week our category will be clothing.)

 

Easy Interactive Books

My friend Bev came up with this brilliant idea years ago.  I didn't need it for a number of years, but last year I had several students who benefitted from having more interaction during their story time.

We simply took an inexpensive paperback book and cut it apart.  Next we ran the pages through the laminator.  We then took a targeted vocabulary word from each page and created a Boardmaker document with a picture. Next we used the hole punch binding tool that we have in our teacher workroom to bind the book back together.  Finally, we used velcro dots to make each page interactive.

This has been a great way for us to create inexpensive interactive books for circle time.

Temporary Quarantine

Our district has had a plan in place in case we had to have specific classes quarantine.  I was hoping my class wouldn't have to do this, but alas, we had a direct exposure and we were moved to remote learning for our quarantine period.

I searched for social stories to help my students understand what was happening, but didn't find one that directly supported our situation.  I adapted Going Back to Distance Learning from Autism Little Learners to create one that made sense for our situation.

I also made some simple visuals on our calendar to help the students see how many more days of zoom lessons we would have and when we would return to school.