Pigeons, Skunks, Halloween, and Anchor Charts

It's safe to say at this point, all weeks are super busy. I meant blog earlier in the week, but of course I didn't. Which leads to the really random title of this post. Here's some classroom happenings from the past week.

This activity was one we did several weeks ago, but I've never shared. We read one of my favorite stories, A Pet for Petunia. This fits in perfectly for the pet unit in Reading Street. We made skunks and brainstorm animals that would make good pets. Skunks didn't make the cut of course.

We have been having a ball with our first author study: Mo Williems. I always start author studies on Mo Williems because the books are easy to read and always a class favorite. Mo makes reading fun!

We talked about character traits

I also introduced the comprehension skill, Plot, using Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. 

Please disregard the mistake at the bottom. It has since been fixed :)

We made our own pigeons to go with the plot activity.

Do you have an iPad in your classroom? We are lucky enough to have one and I downloaded the best app to go with our Mo Williems author study. It's called Don't Let the Pigeon Run this App. It's a little expensive but so neat! Mo teaches you how to draw the pigeon and you can record your own voice to use in a story! I used the app whole group to learn how to draw the pigeon by putting it under the Elmo. It worked great!

I ran up to school this morning to decorate for Halloween, among other things. I love, love, love Halloween. It's my favorite holiday!

And lastly we have been busy learning so much! Is anyone else struggling with rhyming?? This is always something I feel like my kids struggle with so I made a chart to help with this and some centers that I will share later.

We have also been talking about what good readers do!

We learned about Main Idea last week.

Hope everyone is having a great weekend! :)