Really "nailing" Halloween

Another teacher at my preschool gave me this idea, so I can't take the credit for it. I brought in our pumpkin the day after Halloween and some random nails from our tool box. I let the kids hammer away. They loved poking the nails in, swinging the hammers,  and guessing what the inside looked like with nails poked through it. The pumpkin had an awesome design on it at the end. 

We put in next to the paper bag pumpkins in the hall to display. Once it started to rot, we opened it up and looked at the spikey nails. Some of the nails had pierced seeds, which, with three year old humor, was hilarious!

Pumpkins!

I've been meaning to get started on this blogging thing for a while. I just haven't made it a priority until now. For the past few months, I've been taking pictures of stuff I've done and writing down ideas I've had to eventually write about.
I'm big into Pinterest. I stayed off it for a long time, but now I'm hooked. I love the ideas people share and I love how it inspires me to try new things. 
Anyway, I was looking for an idea of a gift to give my students for Halloween that didn't involve candy since they get enough of that already on that holiday. I found this idea for pumpkin pie playdough. As Halloween approached, I got busy and realized making play dough, especially a new recipe for the first time, was ambitious. Using her idea for inspiration, I bought clementines and made jack-o-latern faces on them. The cutest ones are the ones I drew stem side up. (Obviously I'm no artist, but the kids got a kick out of them and the parents loved them!)

Kandinsky Circles

I teach the oldest three's class at our preschool. At this point in the year, some of them are already four. Most of them will be four by January. In my class, each month has a different theme and each day focuses on a different aspect of this theme. October's theme was Colors. There was a red day, a yellow day, a blue day... etc.
November's theme was Shapes. Each day we explored a new shape, looking at its properties and recreating and finding that shape in art, sports, science, nature, food, and music. On circle day, I had a large poster of Kandinsky's painting Squares with Concentric Circles. We looked at the painting and talked about the colors and shapes we saw. Using bottle caps of different sizes, squares cut out from foam scraps, and tacky glue (spread on with popsicle sticks because squeezing those bottles is really hard), my kids got creative. They received no instructions, just the supplies and the muse (Kandinsky's poster).
Next year, I will give them colored construction paper to create on instead of the white paper. Then I will frame it on a larger paper for a cleaner finish. This project was so fun and leant itself to great math convos (comparing sizes of bottle caps and different shapes, making patterns) which I hadn't really expected. Definitely staying on the lesson plan for next year!