Halloween Week Was a Scream!

On Monday we used Miss Liz's welcome song, which is such a joy for Miriam and (he) Lane because they get to stand up and flash their grins with a little coy head bobbing. Everyone wanted to dress the weather frog (and feed swimmy, the class mascot; and say the prayers, and sit in the huge awkward leather chair on wheels), so we talked about having a sticker chart next time to show who has had turns so far.

The lesson material had us hardly able to contain ourselves of course, but we managed to discuss Halloween and pumpkins along with a letter game using the "at" sound (Teri, I had to laugh that you did the same thing the following week and I apologize for the delayed post, but as you said, repetition is golden). The "A" and "T" magnets were placed on the floor, surrounded by consonants such as M, P, Z, J, R, C, B, H, etc. Each child chose a consonant to place in front of "at", and then decided if it was a real word, and if so, determined if it was a Halloween word. Elizabeth was skeptical about my stretch of the word mat being included because of doormats at trick-or-treating time. But no one could dispute cat, bat, rat, or hat.

Thanks to the other teachers, we had lots of Halloween stories to choose from, our favorite being Berenstain Bears and The Spooky Tree, which had each child riveted and terrified and begging for more.

Here we are dancing the Monster Mash, Addi doing some break dancing. It truly wasn't Ryann's or Laine's favorite part of the day. But they perked right back up when we had some playtime in "those little guys' room". Playing tigers was the craze of the day, as we had almost enough plastic tiger figurines for an entire tiger preschool family. Ryann is especially good at pretending.


While the kids played, they took turns getting their hands and feet traced on black paper for our grand Halloween art surprise, which turned out not to be a grand surprise. The kids were excited about drawing their own pumpkin faces and gluing on their own hands and feet so the moms could guess which pumpkins were whose. We just got too excited about the party to remember that on Wednesday.

Writing/Coloring time was fun. Laine did a super job on her capital and lower case letters after only one example. A cute occurance was that Elizabeth lent Addi several different colors of her crayons during our H workbook time, and upon being asked for peach, she kindly replied, "Honey, you're going to have to get some crayons of your own." Seriously, it was in the kindest way with utmost concern for the situation. And Liz, don't worry, Addi has crayons, they just weren't as easily reached or as fun as the ones coming out of that cute little pouch I think.

The other awesome thing we (I) forgot was our performance! The kids memorized (or re-memorized, it appeared) the Five Little Pumpkins poem with actions and much enthusiasm. You'll have to see if they remember it still. Pretty cute stuff!

We carved the hat off of a pumpkin to end the day and Miriam proved to have the most zeal and dedication for scooping pumpkin guts, with or without the scraping tool.


Wednesday was terribly exciting, as you all remember. Before you arrived, the highlights were:

• singing the hello song to each child in costume (Tinkerbell, won't you stand up...)
• practicing the Five Little Pumpkins with even more enthusiasm (jumping included)
• dressing the weather frog after the first snow...everyone got a turn
• putting the finishing touches on the party food (taking turns making cinnamon chips using Halloween cookie cutters)
• what in the world just happened to my font? that was a novice blogger accident!

Thanks for making it a great time! We are loving preschool days each week.