Halloween and Pumpkins

What an awesome day of school!  We had so much fun with our Halloween theme this morning.  We were able to play with colored rice in our sensory bins.  We dumped and scooped and buried and made a mess!  We played dress up and explored all the different costumes and then decorated the room by cutting out decorations (note to parents: please practice more cutting at home!  Just let them cut scraps any way they want to in order to develop these very important muscles.)

 We had fun putting Halloween stickers in our notebooks and worked on those fine motor skills to get the backing off of those pesky stickers.  We also started our game "Guess My Secret Rule".  In this game there are three objects with the same characteristic and one object that doesn't match.  We identify the object that doesn't match and why.  It's a tricky game we'll be working on for most of November.

 We also did a fun drawing in our notebooks about what we are going to be for Halloween.  So much fun!

 Afternoon preschool had a fantastic time talking all about pumpkins.  We measured and scooped, weighed and floated our pumpkins all day.  We took notes about our observations and (some of us) squished pumpkin guts in our hands!

 We continued our group reading lessons which are going quite swimmingly.  I'm impressed with everyone's progress.  Keep up the good work!  For art we also drew pictures of our costumes for Halloween and each child was encouraged to write what they were going to be.  It was interesting to watch this first attempt at writing something.  They stumbled upon "sounding it out" just like we do in reading and you could hear each of them thinking about the main sounds in each word.  The pictures below show "Fairy" and "Dragon", for those of you new to decoding preschool writing :).