Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Pumpkin! Pumpkin!

A Kindergarten Pumpkin Patch

October always brings with it the fun of pumpkins!  And we loved creating our own little pumpkin patch here in our classroom.

This unit provided us with so many opportunities to learn about plant life cycles.  We loved the Jeanne Titherington story, Pumpkin Pumpkin, for its simple yet fun illustration of this cycle. 

We used our pocket chart to retell the Pumpkin Story (plus we made a mini version of this story to practice our reading skills).













We also practiced our writing skills by making our own version of the Pumpkin Story.  The munchkins did an amazing job remembering proper spelling of our sight words & proper punctuation.  They also did a fantastic job using what they know about phonics to attempt writing unfamiliar words.  It was wonderful to see how many munchkins used a " secret agent 'e' " when spelling the word "vine".  Wow!

See the seed.


See the vine.


See the (fowre) flower.


See the (pumpken) pumpkin.



We also used a pocket chart poem called Pumpkins Everywhere (which came with a little emergent reader to focus on more fluency and sight word vocabulary). 











After playing several games to match the sentence strips to the correct pictures and practice choral reading, the munchkins created a class book with the same title. 
Everyone received a picture of a 3-letter C-V-C word.  The munchkins were to write the sentence:
Pumpkins by the ______.
They filled in the blank by isolating the three sounds of the word in their picture.  They did a great job hearing all the sounds and writing those simple words conventionally!


They did an equally great job segmenting the syllables of the word "pumpkin" in order to attempt that spelling!  It's not such a big word when it's spelled as two little words!












The munchkins took what they learned to create this book page and made a great poster paper for our bulletin board using the same format.  This time, however, after their terrific sentence was written, they cut it apart and glued it back together in the correct order & of course, illustrated it. 











They looked wonderful...














and they made a great bulletin board!




Then the munchkins created their own pocket chart strips...cutting and ordering the story while matching the pictures to the text.













Our other fun pumpkin poem was probably everyone's favorite...

Five Little Pumpkins.

We had a blast with this one using the poem, an interactive book and (the most fun) our puppet mitten.



Then we created a mini book with little interactive pumpkins and a great little accordion book (from Oriental Trading).



















We also made a take home booklet of the poem, complete with little movable mini pumpkins.




 
And who can resist making "Five Little Pumpkins" snack?



YUM!

All in all, we had a great time in the pumpkin patch!

Until next time...
Giggles,
Mrs. D.

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