Halloween Day

We had a lot of fun in Little Adventures Preschool today.  It was the first day that our new friends I and M joined the party.  Yay for more girls in my life! 

We did this fun matching activity.  It came from the Creative Resources printables, but I'm sure you could easily make your own.  The idea was to match the pumpkins that had the same face, so we talked in great detail about the shape of the eyes, nose and mouth.

 Next we played a graphing game from 2 Teaching Mommies Halloween set.  I also sent home the printable for kids to do as homework. 

 This copy I laminated and used wet erase markers to fill it in.  The boxer costume was the winner (was rolled 10 times first).  I also laminated the dice and used velcro on all the "glue" tabs.  I wanted to be able to store it flat and it seemed to work out just fine.

 One of the things that makes preschool managable for me and makes having an in-home daycare a stress for me is clean up.  I love that I can leave our mess and deal with it right after the kids go home.  So much less stress and so much more learning can take place!  This is the picture of after art time today.

 For art today we did some drawing with pencils and tracing Halloween stencils.  We also decorated our papers with Halloween stickers.  Then we added paint to the mix.  I took the idea from Little Family Fun to use cookie cutters to paint. The kids seemed to get the hang of it and like it until they decided that finger painting was better.

 So, C (will be 3 years in January) is definately the class clown.  I was helping another child wash his hands and there was a bunch of giggling at the table.  I returned to find that he had painted his hands, face and hair with a mixture of the black, yellow and orange paint.  It took all of my control to not burst out laughing.  I would have let myself laugh if it was just us, but with 6 other kids there I knew the idea would be appealing for other kids to try if I didn't hold it together. What a nut!

 If you were wondering what a paint smock over a muscle costume looks like, here you go:

 Another activity we did today was to glue pumpkin seeds onto paper.  Some kids did designs, some kids (like C) jut did blobs of glue and seeds.

 They also had the option to use the bottle or use a paintbrush to get the glue onto the paper.

 Here is everyone working so well on putting their stickers on their papers.

 We had a very delisous snack today.  Every family provided a portion of it and all the kids were pleased with it.  I was too!  It may be the healthiest thing they eat today (bananas, apples, cucumbers, zucchini hummas and homemade lemonaid).