We started the first full week of November discovering the new pattern on our calendar (turkey, turkey, cornucopia). We discussed what a cornucopia was, what is was used for, and why they used that instead of things we know about now. It was a wonderful discussion with our class.
We started the week with making an Indian Corn Stalk. Students cut out the small squares in the color's of their choice. They then glued them on the corn stalk. We then "got out our counting finger out" and counted the number of kernels of corn on our cob. For now, we are simply working on our counting skills, one to one correspondance, and number identification so I wrote the number in yellow. I read the 'big number' and then told them the two numbers that made that up. They then worked on writing those numbers and identified those individual numbers. This also introduced some good vocabulary.
Tuesday was election day
We discussed that today is the day Mom's and Dad's vote for who they want to be the president. **A little boy pipes up, "YEAH! You can vote for Bobama or what's that old guys name again?"*** We discussed what it means to vote: everyone picks their one favorite, put it on a ballot, puts that ballot in a box, a ballot box, and then they count those. The one that got the most picks to be favorite wins to be president. Finally, we discussed that we are not old enough to vote for real so we can do a pretend election.
We then got our turn to vote. Students lined up at the polls, and waited their turn. I had a "blind" set up so that their vote could be private. They then took a marker and ballot from a pile, write "O" for Obama or "M" for Mitt Romney. They then put that in the ballot box and we had the next voter come up. We will tabulate the results the next day. We developed many election vocabulary words today!
**I want to note***
We had no discussion on the candidates and what they stand for. I just wanted them to work on the voting process, voting vocabulary, and some writing skills. **
At our circle time, we took the ballots out, read the vote, and tallied it on the board. We then saw who our president we chose was and compared to who our projected president was.
We then made sensory acorns. I found an acorn template and printed it out. Students cut out the acorns. Students painted the bottom with glue on a paint brush (I did water it down a bit). They then sprinkled this area with coffee. They then brushed the top of the acorn with the glue mixture and paintbrush and sprinkled it with oatmeal. This project smelled good, looked good, and was fun to make!
We read a book, Thanksgiving Day, from Scholastic. It discusses why we eat the food we do for Thanksgiving. This opened up discussion again about the Cornucopia and the first Thanksgiving. I highly recommend reading this book to young students to help them understand the "why" of what we do.
Next week we are talking about what animals do for the winter. We are going on a field trip on this topic and will tie this into this book next week as well.
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