Creepy Carrots with K

simonandschuster.com

Just two years old, Creepy Carrots has become an instant classic. It won a 2013 Caldecott Honor medal and a place in my curriculum.

Luckily, kindergartners liked it as much as the preschoolers (although I was told by AM that it just wasn't scary enough). And one student even noticed that "It looks like a movie!" That was exactly what the illustrator, Peter Brown, had in mind: Hitchcock movies and The Twilight Zone.

Here are the kids' versions of creepy carrots.

Creepy Carrots with AM PreK

We started getting ready for Halloween today in PreK with Trick or Treat Countdown and Creepy Carrots. After the readalouds, the students created their own creepy carrots. Then they posed for pictures, making "creepy" faces. They crack me up.

 

Room 11 Dewey Detectives and Draw-ers

The Dewey Decimal system is a way of sorting nonfiction books. I don't expect my students to memorize specific numbers; that's what the online catalog is for. I do, however, want them to understand how certain topics go together. At least according to how Mr. Dewey thought they did.

Each table of fourth graders got a stack of books from a "hundreds." They had to work together to figure out how the subjects could be classified under one major label. Can you solve the puzzles?

• 500s: planets, electricity, magnets, weather, dinosaurs, bugs, ecosystems, animals
• 700s: movies, art, photography, music, sports,jokes, crafts
• 900s: maps, ancient civilizations, countries, states, wars, explorers

After they successfully identified their hundreds' categories, Room 11 had fun drawing:

Songs of the Seasons

source: harpercollins.com

Kindergarten, Prek, and DLP students helped me read an interactive book called Tap the Magic Tree by Christie Matheson. We knocked on the trunk, jiggled the book, blew away fallen leaves, closed our eyes and counted to 10 ... and after every action, the tree had changed with the seasons!

Some of the classes had time to cut out pictures that represented each season and glue them in order. Spring seemed to be the most tricky to remember.

Finally, we watched some old-school Sesame Street videos with songs about the seasons. Enjoy!

RI Festival of Children's Books and Authors

Did you know that every October, well known children’s book authors and illustrators come to Rhode Island for a day of presentations, crafts, and booksignings? And that it only costs $5 to attend? And that your family might be able to get in for free if you return the drawing entry that's going home in the library newsletter?

On Saturday, October 18, the Lincoln School in Providence will host the following authors and illustrators. Most of them have worked on A LOT of books, so I’m just going to list the ones that Garden City students would be most familiar with.

• Joseph Bruchac – Skeleton Man 
• Carmen Agra Deedy – The Library Dragon 
• Jeff Kinney – Diary of a Wimpy Kid 
• Herman Parish – new Amelia Bedelia books 
• Jon Scieszka – The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs 
• Bob Shea – Unicorn Thinks He’s Pretty Great (which won our Mock Caldecott last year!) 
• David Wiesner – Tuesday 
• Chris Van Allsburg – The Z Was Zapped 

There will be books for sale! And lunch available from food trucks! And storytellers like Len Cabral! And FUN!