Cara Carroll

Catching Up & When The Leaf Blew In

I am home from school today…AGAIN…with a sick little man.  And I’m missing the 50th day of school…SADSVILLE!!!!!  My favorite day of the year!!!!  While my kids are at school dressed in their cutie little poodle skirts and saddle shoes, they’ll be celebrating with root beer floats and 50th day fun TOMORROW.  I can’t miss out on EVERYTHING ;)  One thing is certain…I’m SO ready for my boys to be well again!!!!  Between strep throat, ear infections, and breathing treatments…this momma is spent! Moving on… We celebrated “Character Dress Up Day” at school last week.  I don’t know if I told y’all this before, but one of my littles is in Pre-K at my campus {oh, I LOVE it!  He is in LOVE with school!!!!}  He went as “How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?” and I was “If you Take a Mouse to the Movies”.  You can’t see it, but I wore a little clapboard and old filmstrips in my overalls :)  We even went on a little “character parade”…it was PRECIOUS!!!!  SO fun!!  1character A couple of the fabulous teachers on my campus came to our pod to do a little science experiment with our kids.  First up, feeling *ghost eggs*.  ghosteggs2  ghosteggs1 copy Then we moved on to *boo bubbles*…SO cool!!!! ghosteggs4  ghosteggs5  ghosteggs6 And we topped it all off with a little dry ice investigation… ghosteggs3 That night was Halloween and my boys were in HEAVEN.  So was I…SO much candy!!  HA!!!  There was even one house in our neighborhood that was passing out freshly popped popcorn from one of those vintage popcorn machines.  Landon is NOT a fan of popcorn, but I made him grab a bag for me 🙂 I love that my boys are still young enough for the *kid* costumes…there will be plenty of years in our future for ninjas and masked villains 🙂 1halloween   Yesterday we read this book by Steve Metzger… One of my favorite Fall reads!!  It’s great for SO many reasons and there are SO many teaching opportunities that come from it.  I decided to use this book to teach my kids about action words…aka: verbs :)  We talked about action words and compared them to nouns…then we played a quick little “Action or Not?!” whole group game before reading.  Basically, I just called out a lot of different words {nouns & verbs}.  If they heard a noun, they did nothing.  If they heard a verb, they had to act out the word I said.  Clearly, you can’t act out the word “green” or “girl”…so that helped them to quickly see the difference between the two.  After reading the book, we collected the action words in the story and made a little anchor chart. 1leaf copy We also made some really great text-to-text connections.  The kids were great at telling me that this book reminded them of “If You Take a Mouse to the Movies”.  Awesome connection, little bits!!!  Right after we did this activity, I got a call from Little Bit’s 3-school telling me he was running a 103 temp, so I changed up my plans for the rest of the afternoon.  I can’t wait to share with you some of the other activities we did with the book!!!!  Just a few more weeks ‘til Thanksgiving…is time flying INSANELY fast, or is that just me?!?!?!  We’ll be working out of these packets for the next couple of weeks… Slide1 1thanks I’ll be adding 12 November themed Math stations tonight!!  Happy Election Day, sweet friends!!  Just incase you’re wondering, my vote is cast 🙂 phildunphy

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  12. Sarah says

    Our little firsties are getting sick too..something's going around. I brought it home to my poor fiance too (somehow I don't have anything..yet) Your boys are so cute! They look like they had fun!

    Sarah
    teachingiscolorful.blogspot.com

    Reply

  19. Jillian Coster says

    Great ideas about acting out the verbs in the book! They must have had so much fun! I'm going to try it with my first graders. I have the same book! Love it! I just started a blog recently. Check it out for some freebies!!

    Mrscostersclass.blogspot.com

    ~Jillian

    Reply

  21. Courtney Fidell says

    I am obsessed with all of your units! I am a first year teacher and I love "borrowing" some (or ALL) of your ideas. I was just looking through all of your old Thanksgiving posts and it made me want to do everything! How do you fit all of it in??

    Reply

  23. vicky1970 says

    Hi Cara,
    I'm so sorry your little guy has been sick and you had to miss the 50th day of school. I know how much you love having your little one at school with you. I have been blessed to have my children with me at my school for 8 years between my daughter and son. My little man is a 5th grader this year so I will be all ALONE next year. { Insert sadness here } I'm enjoying every minute of it – and he's student body president this year. How fun is that?!?
    Have a great FRIDAY and I pray he is ALL better by now. :o)
    Blessings,
    Vicky
    Traditions, Laughter and Happily Ever After

    Reply

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