Halloween Party!

Everyone came all dressed up in their costumes for our preschool Halloween bash.  We played too many fun Halloween games to count.  One of my favorites though was when we all got in a circle and sang this chant: "Hello (child's name) Spook E Doo...What is a trick that you can do? Will you hop or bend or spin around? Will you stretch or wiggle or touch the ground?) Then each kid would show off their "special" tricks.  We had lots of laughs and nobody wanted to stop showing off their awesome moves....we have some talent for sure!  Another fun activity that went really well was sorting all the candy.  This took our class a long time, but everyone really worked together well.  Of course the reward was for each child to get one of each type of candy once they were all sorted.  (Sorry parents for sending your kids home with tons of sugar!)

 Dressing up like scary mummies. Riley was the only one who didn't want to be mummified.

We played pin the fangs on the bat. 

The pumpkin walk was a big hit too!

We danced right out of some of our costumes. 

Yay! Prizes!

What good little sorters our class has become. 

Happy Halloween!



Spooky Masks

We got in the Halloween spirit by making scary masks. Silly Teacher Lindsay thought we'd paint our ghosts white and our bats black etc...but our class had a different vision.  We had a blast busting out all of the colors and our masks turned out awesome.  In fact they are just "to die for!"

Our friend and neighbor, Riley, came to visit our class today.  We had so much fun spending time with him and getting to know him better.  We hope you come back to Little Owls soon!!!

Can you guess who is who???

We love reading!

We start each class off with silent reading.  The kids get a chance to pick a book or two that really captures their interest. Then they are given 15 minutes to look at the book and pretend to read it to themselves.  This is a wonderful way to help them gain book appreciation, print awareness, and early reading comprehension skills. At the end of the 15 minutes I read a couple of the books to them. We never want storytime to end! 

Our first field trip to the Creswell Firestation

Last week we used dramatic play to help us understand literacy preposions such as over, under, in, out, and behind by pretending to be firefighters. We also learned how to stop, drop, and roll, and other basic fire safety skills.  Then our class took a field trip to our local fire station.  We had so much fun getting in all of the fire trucks, and ambulances.  My favorite part was watching all of their faces as the firefighters turned on the sirens.  They all covered their ears and couldn't believe how loud it was.  Cute little Elizabeth was convinced we were going to an actual fire and was scared to death.  In the end we all overcame a few fears and learned that firefighters are there to protect us and are our friends.  Thank you Creswell Firefighters!

Love this pic of my parent volunteers.  Thanks for all of your much needed help!

After we left the fire station we enjoyed a picnic in the park.  What a beautiful day. We had a blast!

Science

Everyday we try and incorporate science into our lesson plans.  It has been so fun watching my class realize that practically everything around them can be science. Here we are learning about refraction and bending light as we do the bending pencil trick in water. I love watching them explore the world around them through science.    

Since Halloween is right around the corner we used bats as a theme for one of our lesson plans.  We read Stellaluna and several other batty books, we learned the difference between birds and mammals, and we also learned all about how bats find food. For science we played a game where we selected one child to be the bat.  The bat was then blindfolded, the remaining students were to be insects and each given a rattle (we made our own and used math to count beans into baby food jars). The blindfolded bat would say “eeek” and the insects would respond with a short rattle.  The bat repeated the “eeek” and the insects repeated the rattle until found by the bat.  We all took turns being the bat and had so much fun.