Toil and Trouble

Halloween has always been my daughter's favorite holiday.  It's all about the season, weather, colors, and definitely the cool Halloween costumes children wear to pretend they are someone other than themselves.  I have taken her love and continued to share with our little preschoolers and oh boy what fun they have.  Let's take a look at the last two weeks as we prepare to learn all while having fun.

I love to set up our room in a fun thematic layout.  I set out a large felt board (shown above) with a tree that I made the night before.  Felt leaves are scattered about so they can let their imagination run free.  I also set the tables up with paints in warm colors of fall (orange, brown, red, and green), along with picture of a pumpkin for each child.

Everyone quickly got busy that Monday morning.  Sister's here painting.....and below....

Friends filled the tree with beautiful felt leaves of all colors.  Including some acorns.  They counted the different colors, and used their imagination discussing how the leaves were falling off of trees in this scene.

You can see the intent look on this little one's face.  I believe this tree was played with all day one time or another.

By the afternoon, we already began our thematic curriculum.  Cutting out and matching halves of pictures related to our theme, Toil and Trouble.

They are looking pretty busy here.

She was sharing a story with me about how she was already 4 1/2 years old and getting ready for kindergarten.  She told me not to be sad because she was leaving next year because she promised to visit me.

Our two year old is in her beginning stages of learning to use scissors.   She is gaining hand and finger muscle strength to open and close.  Instead of giving her the actual sheet to cut out, I give her paper strips to cut while I cut out her images.  Once she has mastered line cutting, she too will cut just like her friends. 

Here our 4 1/2 year old cuts with no problem and his friend beside him, who is 3 years old is right behind him in cutting skills. 

We just noticed this little 2 1/2 year old has finally mastered his cutting skills.  He only needs a bit of help on detailed corners, other than that, he is now one of the big kids. 

Our Tuesday morning set up:
Pumpkin dot art.....and....

Eyeball counting....even tho it was skeleton hands, at first glance it was a bit unnerving.  Then when they started playing, they forgot all about the skeleton hands.

It was cute to hear her not only count the eyes as she placed them inside the ice cube tray, but after each eye, she counted how many were left to do, the beginning of deduction.

This little one mastered these skeleton hands quickly as she placed the eyes one by one into the tray.

The dot art begins...

Time to count just how many flies are bothering this monster.  We counted 7, and used our fingers to make fingerprint flies.  

We also read the number 7, and the word seven, then attempted to print it out.

We also had gourd sketching...

 

 

We painted mini pumpkins.

We painted ghosts....

We traced spider webs

Writing bones and learning how to organize them on paper.

Bringing on the costumes...and fun.....

 Passing out candy for our friends.

 Just hanging around with princess and batman.

Science in the Kitchen

Worms in Mud

 

Cheers with our creations.

Bones....
this project was a bit difficult for this group.  I realized, it was a bit too hard for them to cut out each piece of bone, so we helped with lots of the cutting, but they completed the rest for themselves. 

Next time, this will be a complete skeleton for them to cut around.  Live and learn LOL

Kids love sensory bins.  We decided to make three of them full of Halloween jewels and toys and everything they found, they got to keep as their gifts.  They LOVED LOVED LOVED this!

Time to get back into kitchen science.  Making homemade clay so we can create our own bones.

Finished product...., now onto molding them into bones.

There was more learning, dancing, singing, game playing and just oh so much more fun.  I hope I gave some ideas of fun things to do with your little ones.  We had so much fun. Can't find the picture, but this week, F was for FEMUR...lol
  Until next week everyone.....

♥ PattyKakesKidz ♥