Criss-cross APPLESAUCE...It's Johnny's Birthday!!!

Happy  Fall y'all!!!!  I am SUPER excited that my favorite season is upon us...the cooler weather, the beautiful colors, Halloween, Thanksgiving...I could go on forever!!!  Anyhow, this month, we've been learning all about apples.  Our lessons culminated with a big celebration of Johnny Appleseed.  We read many books about Johnny, and even made applesauce in the classroom!!! It smelled A.MAZ.ING all day long!!!  We listed all of the information we found about Johnny Appleseed on our Johnny Appleseed anchor chart:

Each of the students brought in one apple.  We took all of the apples, peeled them and cooked in the crock pot all day to make applesauce.

ALL of the students really enjoyed this finished product:

We invited the PREK 3&4 to come listen to us preform our APPLE poems and songs:

We have also been reading stories written by Kevin Henkes this month.  We are using his stories to learn all about CHARACTER.  We read Chrysanthemum, Webbely Worried and Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse.  We compared and contrasted the characters, and learned how to create a story map of a story, and also learned how important it is to be kind to one another.  We used the story Chrysanthemum to understand how unkind words can hurt other's feelings.  I made a large, red heart for the class.  Then, as I read the story I had each child in my class take a turn to wrinkle the heart each time somebody made fun of Chrysanthemum's name.  We passed the heart around to each child to see how much the heart had changed.  We then talked about how hurtful words can stay on a persons heart no matter how much you try to smooth it out.  We then promised to "Think and be smart, because it's hard to fix a wrinkled heart" as we placed a band-aid (with our names) on the heart to symbolize this pledge:

Working on our Character learning in our interactive notebooks:

 Our name flowers:

We also started to learn all about NOUNS.  We also completed our first "read the room" activity where the students scoured the classroom looking for nouns.  Once they found a word they wanted to use, they had to place it on the correct Post-it in their notebooks (person, place or thing):

Here are some first day of school photographs...I was just waiting on some photo releases!!!

 "First Grader" hallway bulletin board display:

Here are the links to the Kevin Henkes stories that we read in class:
Chrysanthemum:

Wemberly Worried:

Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse:

Can you believe it's almost OCTOBER?!!