Hello There, October!

It's October 1st. The days are getting shorter, the temperature is getting cooler, the leaves are changing colors, and it's time for a new theme! Yesterday we opened our Mother Goose Time box for "In The Orchard" and checked out some of the new items we will be adding to our morning meeting wall. My littles were ready to jump right in with "Day 1" today!

The first week of this month's curriculum is all about the life-cyle of a tree, so of course we started with a seed. There was lots of good discussion about what fruit has seeds and which ones do/do not grow on trees. I introduced our new Bible verse and story, which is about "good fruit" and "bad fruit". For previous themes before MGT curriculum was introduced, I tried to find a song for devotional time that would help the children learn their verse, so they were happy that this routine has continued with the Truth Tunes CD.  There was also lots of excitement about the ring that holds the daily theme related songs for the whole month. Today's song about seeds was sung to the tune of "Do You Know the Muffin Man". This song is one of their favorites, so of course they also HAD to sing the song with the original words, too!

During centers, everyone had a chance to investigate different kinds of seeds with a magnifying glass, and they counted and sorted with pinchers into ice cube trays however they saw fit. I was impressed that they were able to identify the pumpkin seeds (because pumpkin seeds are sold differently in Japan - without the crunchy outer shell, so they are green) and the sunflower seeds right away.

Since I had just pulled out the calendar numbers, but hadn't yet laminated anything to hang up, I used the calendar as the math center activity, and asked each group to work together to put the numbers in the correct order. Some of my little smarty pants even figured out the new pattern without me even asking about it.

We finished up My Little Jounal for Fables and Folktales by drawing a picture of the favorite character at the writing center. The winners were Mommy Crab & little crab, the tortoise, and the lion and mouse. Everyone got to choose a new name tag to write their name. It's amazing to see the progress from the same activity last month!

For science and sensory, I brought an apple to school to share. We all crowded around one table and passed the apple around and talked about how it looked, felt, smelled, etc. I cut the apple into 4 large sections so we could get all the seeds out, and then I passed around one section so they could observe and talk about the difference between the inside and outside of the apple. I even threw a little bit of multiplication in when I showed them that by cutting the remaining three sections of the apple into 3 pieces each, there were 9 pieces: enough for each student to have 1 piece. They thought that was amazing how it worked out. Last, but not least we counted all the apple seeds together.

Counting apple seeds is serious business!

The art project will have to carry over to tomorrow, since we ran out of time after one small group. I loved the low prep activity, and they turned out super cute!

All my kiddos were super engaged and on-task today, and looking forward to more new things to learn about tomorrow. I was proud of myself that we actually accomplished all the activities listed for Day 1 in the Teacher Planning Guide. Teacher success!