Busy, Busy October

Man, is it just me or is October really busy?  I just realized I never shared my kiddos work from our 12 Ways to Get to 11 project.  As a quick recap, we read the book and the kids broke up into groups to create their own pages based on the format of the book.  I have to say that the kids did a great job.  Many of their pictures were creative and their number sentences gave me the opportunity to teach them how to "chunk" numbers when adding more than 2 digits.  Here are a few of their pages:

 "One bat, 1 princess, 3 trees, and 2 pieces of candy"

 "There are 6 eyeballs and 1 broomstick"

"There are 3 clouds, 1 sun, and 1 rooster."

Each group had a different sum to make.  I let each group decide what they wanted the theme of their book to be.  Most groups chose Halloween (of course), but I did have a group choose a farm theme (you see one of their pages above) and one group chose a Christmas theme. 

Last week, we studied owls.  The kids had a great time and found out that some of the things they thought they knew about owls were actually misconceptions (like all owls are nocturnal or they all live in trees).  I wanted to share a fun activity we did.  When I started going through my owl stuff, I found these old paper bag puppets:

Now, I don't know how it is in your school, but we don't really have time to just make paper bag puppets unless there is some Common Core learning involved!  So, instead of just making puppets, we turned these into fact holders.  We had each child write 4 or more facts on paper squares.

Then, we stapled the top of the bag shut and cut a slit where the bottom of the bag folds.  The kids then were able to put their facts into the owl to take them home and share their learning with their families!

The kids had a blast with this and we were still able to incorporate some fun art into our day!