Halloween Happenings in my Classroom

Holidays are so fun when you are a preschool teacher. There are endless craft ideas, silly songs, and creative books. I'm eating it up.  This year in my class, my students did some of the same activities that my students did last year. But, I also added a few new ones.  Here are some of my favorite Halloween picks (and pics)!

Today, my students help cut a pumpkin open and then reached their arms in to scoop out the pumpkin goop. Then, they each drew their ideas for how we should carve the pumpkin. We picked one feature from every students' drawn jack-o-lanterns. 

This is what we ended up with!

All month we have been singing a spooky song about witches' brew. Stirring and stirring and stirring my breeeeewwwwwww. Stirring and stirring and stirring my breeeeeeewwwwwwwww. Tip toe, tip toe, tip toe....BOO!  We've talked about brew and the cauldron we would stir it in. We've brainstormed what we would add to our potions and discussed how this is all fictional, not factual. Today, we used the ingredients they suggested and made our own brew to stir! 

Ingredients? Assorted bugs, spider rings, lizards, one gold fish, one frog, two small pumpkins, witches' hair (some black stringy decoration I found), eye balls, and ghosts. Mix those disgusting tidbits with some cornstarch, water, and yellow and green paint and you get WITCHES' BREW! My students played I Spy in the cauldron, practiced scooping things up with the spoon and filling the small pumpkins, and talked about which items sink and which float. This one definitely exceeded my expectations. 

I saved my favorite for last. We sing a silly holiday song about five pumpkins on a gate that roll away. My students started asking questions about how the pumpkins would roll: Bumpy or smooth? Fast or slow? Does every pumpkin roll? So, we tested it out. First, we built ramps. Some steep, some with small inclines, some horizontal (not ramps), and some vertical. We roll small pumpkins down these ramps to answer our questions (and to unearth another slew of investigations)! Another teacher built upon my idea and offered my kids gourds to roll down. Some rolled and some didn't. We made guesses using what we already knew as to why this was true. So much fun!

Happy Halloween!

The Many Faces of Z-man

Z-man and I like to play a game that we call "The Faces Game". We usually do it to keep him entertained like while we are waiting in line at the grocery store or waiting for someone to meet us or when he is getting grumpy and I want to make him laugh. I make a face and then makes a matching face. Then, its his turn. We end up giggling--or as he says "wiggling"--like crazy.

 

An added bonus? We also talk about the faces and how we are probably feeling. Its really insightful to see what he thinks I'm feeling when I make different faces. He says "Happy." "Lovey." "Frust-ur-rated." "Silly." Its like a mirror for me and glimpse into how my guy views me. Also, the three seconds or so that it takes him to move his face to match mine, trying to move different parts...priceless.  

Creepy Crawly Things

As I've mentioned before, bugs aren't really my thing. I'm trying to embrace them, or more truthfully, I'm trying to not freak out when I see them. Z-man's teacher, who is a true nature lover, has reminded me several times that he will learn to react as I do and she has encouraged me to react curiously and without fear. Blah. Easy for her to say. And truly it is. She feeds the class crickets daily with meal time in the class. She brings in walking stick bugs that she has caputred with her own hands. She brings slimy slugs, furry caterpillars, and cockroaches into her class in various containers for observing.

I'm trying to embrace the creepy crawlies. I had white grubs in my classroom for a while. We found them while digging for worms and put themt in with grass we were growing. We watched over about two weeks while the grubs destroyed the grass by eating the roots. Cool stuff.

Then, one of my students brought in a woolly bear caterpillar she found on her way to school. Next thing I knew, I was Amazon Prime-ing a butterfly house, complete with five painted lady caterpillars to keep our Woolly Bear company. Today was the first day with all the caterpillars in the classroom. Before I knew it, I was scrapping my lesson plan and embracing my students' questions about caterpillars and worms, our other class pets.

We read books about worms, caterpillars, and butterflies. Then, my students looked at the books in small groups and my assistant and I led them in conversations about similarities and differences between worms and caterpillars.

We poured out our worms and pulled out the caterpillars (my braver assistant took on this task). The students made observations about what they saw.

Finally, my students told me about the observations they had made and the facts they had learned. We made this awesome Venn Diagram!

Rolling in Colors

This month, my class is learning about colors. We started by learning about the primary colors and moved on to secondary colors last week. Each day, the children experiment with color mixing using different mediums. I set up a water table with two sides, one side with red water and the other with yellow. As the kids poured, scooped, and drizzled the water, it turned orange. 

 

Using a projector, we overlapped red, blue, and yellow blocks to make the secondary (and tertiary) colors.

The children combined yellow and blue shaving cream to make green shaving cream. 

My favorite way that we have experimented with colors so far is with rolling pins. I streaked large butcher paper with blue and red paint and my students rolled the pins back and forth in different directions to make purple.

We used these neat textured pins to make unique prints!

 

Its been a colorful month so far and its only the beginning!

Painting Our Way Through the Alphabet

I try hard to take time to reflect on my teaching, my parenting, myself. To think about areas that are real strengths and to identify areas I need that could use some improvement. Perhaps its the social worker in me, but I'm really good at this step. The next step, the important one, of making a plan to improve the not so stellar parts, is a little more difficult for me.
After last school year, I looked at the Virginia Standards for Education for preschoolers and looked over my lesson plans, highlighting some places that I wanted to focus more on this school year. Writing and cutting are two areas that I tended to place less emphasis. I think because this is painful for some three year olds, difficult for most, and successful for few. Its more fun to focus on the other things most of the time. This year, I challenged myself to develop a challenging, educational, and fun way to work on writing regularly in my classroom. I didn't want to it to feel like work for my kids. (More on cutting in a later post.)
My plan?  Each week on Wednesdays, my kids and I first look at a letter (only capitals for now) and brainstorm words that start with the letter, often with my clues, such as "I'm thinking of a word that starts with B that is the opposite of small. Bbbbbb....." and then my students guess "big". Then, we trace a cardboard cut out of that letter one by one around the table while saying a catchy phrase to describe writing it. For example, for A, we said "Up, down, across" while tracing. B? "Line down. Bubble. Bubble." C- "Around, not all the way!" D- "Line Down, BIG Bubble". I have reviewed the previous letters each week through the week as we see them printed in books, find them in our names, or wait in line for something. The kids have been saying them on their own, too!
Then, the most fun part. I squirt paint on the table. Everywhere. No paper, no smocks. (Thank God for stain remover.) We practice writing the letters with either fingers or paint brushes using the paint on the table. I walk around helping each student make the letter by first moving their hand while the say the catchy phrase and then watching them do it on their own. It is a huge mess. But so much fun. And my students literally squeal with excitement when it is "Letter Time!".
That squeegee I have in my classroom? The kids use it to clean up their own space and table is clean in no time!

Writing on their own on easel paper.