Halloween

We heard the story What is Halloween? today.  Then we learnred the fingerplay about 5 little ghosts.  We learned the hand motions to go with the poem, then we decided to act it out.  5 kids were ghosts. As the rhyme counted down, each child went to find a place to hide, until one ghost was left.  That one got to sneak up behind a classmate in the circle and say "Boo!"  Then everyone ran around as the 5 ghosts chased them!  We switched spots and did it again so everyone got to have a chance to be a ghost  and to be chased! 

We went outside to play.  We've been working on putting on our jackets, hats, and gloves by ourselves as well as zipping, snapping, and buttoning.  It's great to see how excited the kids are when they can finally get their jacket on, or zip, or whatever by themselves....they are so proud of themselves!!  (And we're so proud of them too!!)  Emma showed us a trick for putting on our jackets.  Lay the jacket on the floor, stand by the hood side bend over and put both hands in the sleeves, then pick up the jacket and bring it over your head, voila...!  The kids had fun trying this today before we went out for recess.  

We finished making our Halloween Monsters today.  Here's a picture of the finished products!

We also learnred about the letter H today.  We used Do-a-Dots to create the letter H with Mrs. Chyko during activity time!

Yesterday we went outside to look at our tree.  All off the leaves have fallen off.  We talked about how it's sleeping until spring when it will wake up again and we'll see buds and leaves growing on the tree!  

We also all finished painting a pumpkin at the easle.  We have got such artistic children in this class!!

Corduroy, Camping, and The Netherlands

What a great week!  Brooke was our "Maple Leaf" this week.  On Tuesday she shared a beautiful poster board of pictures.  It was fun to see her family and learn about some of her favorite things.  We  found out that Brooke's favorite song is "Let It Go".  When she told us that, lots of the kids started singing it because it was their favorite song too!!  On Wednesday Brooke's Mom and Dad came in and read 3 stories to us about camping.  We heard about Curious George, Calliou, and Maisy who all went on camping trips!!  Then Brooke's parents set out a fire, played camping sounds on their phone, and gave everybody baggies filled with pretzels with marshmallows at the end of them to roast over the fire!  There was chocolate and golden grahams in our baggies too so the kids could make s'mores!  Yum, it was so much fun sitting around the campfire roasting marshamallows.  (Of course we had to turn the lights out too!)  Thanks so much Brooke!

We had music on Wednesday too.  Mrs. Jenkins brought us into a different room and set out boxes for us to use as drums!!  

Earlier in the week, on Tuesday, Mika's Oma and Aunt stopped in for a visit.  They live in the Netherlands and taught us a little bit about their country.  We saw where it was on a map, saw pictures of the king, queen and princesses (there are 3, ask Mika and she'll tell you there names!), saw pictures of tulips, windmills, and canals and learned to count to 5 in dutch!!  We also heard a  popular Dutch children's story with a bunny named Miffy and heard some of it read to us in Dutch!!  Then we colored a sheet with the characters from the story we heard and got a cup filled with Dutch treats.  Thanks Mika for sharing your Oma and Auntie with us!!  

We heard several Corduroy books this week.  We heard Corduroy, A Pocket for Corduroy, Corduroy's Lost and Found, and Corduroy's Halloween.  We made Corduroy out of construction paper and talked a lot about the letter "C" and the sound it makes.  We also started to sing our A, B, C's by reading them off of a poster.  Then we started to sing the sounds of the letters instead of the letter names. This brought about lots of giggles, it's a fun activity to do at home too!!  

We all brought in a favorite stuffed animal for show and tell on Thursday.  We sat in a circle and told everyone the name of our animal and something about it.  We learned that some of the kids carry their stuffed animal everywhere, some of the kids sleep with their animal, and some of the kids have had their animal for their whole life, it was fun to hear the stories the kids shared with the class.

We made a glowing jack 'o lantern for our art project during activity time and finished paiting our pumpkins with Mrs. Chyko at the easle.  We had a chance to get outside and play and also learned the fingerplay about 5 Little Pumpkins.  As I write all of this I realize how busy we were and how much we accomplished this week, no wonder Joan and I were so tired!! 

Rock Painting and Pumpkin Patches

Mika's Mom came in and read us a story about kindness.  Then we painted stones using acryllics to create kindness rocks. Thanks Mika for such a fun project! 

We learned about farms and pumpins to get ready for our trip to Cedarburg Creek Farms.  It was raining and the fields were muddy but I that didn't stop any of us from getting a pumpkin, going through the corn maze or the hay maze!

It was great to see so many parents, grand parents and other family members come out on our trip!!  

Pumpkins and Gourds

We begn our unit on pumpkins and gourds today by hearing a story called Apples and Pumpkins and The Itsy, Bitsy, Pumpkin.  To help us get ready for the story we read the big book The Itsy, Bitsy, Spider and then we sang it and learned hand motions to go with it.  It miight be fun to see if your child can sing the song at home to you!!  We looked at the gourd collection that Maple Leaf has and talked about going to the pumpkin farm on Thursday...the kids seemed really excited about the upcoming trip! 

 Mika was our first "Maple Leaf of the Week".   She brought in some pictures to share with the class and a special treat too...pumpkin cookies, string cheese, fruit snacks and apple cider....yum...thanks, Mika!!!  

We played the A,B,C song on hand bells in music today.  During activity time we worked on star counting with stickers,  the rice table, using pumpkin scented play dough, painting pumpkins at the easle,  playing with the trains, cars, the little people village and Littlest Pet Shop.

More Fall Fun

Carter had fun celebrating his birthday in class!  He brought in marshmallows on a stick and yogurt covered raisins...yum!!  Thanks for the yummy birthday treat and Happy 4th Birthday, Carter!!

We heard more fall stories, and talked about the letter F.  We practiced our glueing skills by making a construction paper F, putting dots of glue on it and adding popcorn to the top.  We popped the popcorn at school so we had fun eating it while we were glueing!  We also practiced our counting skills and picked a number between 1 and 10 and counted out that many pieces of popcorn kernals to glue onto our F.  A lot of us picked 4, or 5 because those numbers begin the the "f" sound!!

We traced our hands on brown construction paper, cut them out and used glue sticks to glue them down to blue paper.  These were are fall trees.  The next time we were in class we crunched up colorful tissue paper to represent fall leaves, and glued them to our hands and created beautiful fall trees!

Besides being fun to do, and letting us be creative, our fine motor skills are being developed as we  put on glue drops, pick up tissue paper, (or popcorn seeds, popcorn, etc.) scrunch the tissue and glue it down!

The weather was beautiful this week so we got outside to play too!!  

Leaves

We started the week by adopting a tree!!  First we went outside and located lots of different trees around Maple Leaf.  We found a maple, a burning bush, a crimson king maple and then right across the street from us we found a beautiful orange, red, yellow, and green sugar maple.  We decided that since we are called Maple Leaf Academy we should probably adopt a maple tree.  This is a picture of the tree we decided to adopt.  What that means is that each month we'll be going outside to look at our tree and observe any changes we see.  This month we noticed the colors of the leaves and that some of the leaves were beginning to fall to the ground.  We picked up some of our favorite leaves to do leaf projects with back in our classroom!

One of the things we used our leaves for was to make the letter L and decorage it with fall leaves!  We had so much fun doing this project and then we tried to write "L is for Leaf".  We're working on learning how to hold a crayon using our thumb and fingers!

Another project we did was leaf prints.  We painted our leaves different colors and then printed them on paper to see what they looked like.  They were so beautiful Mrs. Gould and Mrs. Chyko decided to hang them up in our classroom and make a fall display!

We always have fun playing in the house keeping areas.

We had pegs to use this week at our table.  We're learning how to stack them and put them in the pegboard.  This activity is really fun and it helps strengthen our fingers!  Next week we'll start sorting the pegs and making patterns with them!

We played the game Red Light, Green Light outside today.  We had a classroom visitor during activity time.  Mrs. Hucko, a friend of Mrs. Gould's and Mrs. Chyko's, volunteered to help out.  She worked with us in small groups and played a letter matching game with us.  We practiced counting and indentifying numbers with Mrs. Chyko when we made our "counting starts" sheet.  We finished our leaf printing at the art center with Mrs. Gould.

We heard a lot of good books about Fall and leaves this week.  We heard Clifford's First Autumn, Leaf Season, and Max's Falling Leaves.  We pretended we were leaves and acted out a story where we were leaves being blown around by the wind.  There were lots of giggles while we were doing this, we loved learning about leaves this week.