Happy Halloween

Hi Mom,
Halloween is finally here! We celebrated all week in preschool. On Tuesday, we learned a new song to help us count backwards from 5. It's called "5 Little Bats" and is sung to the tune of "5 Little Ducks". Here are the lyrics:

5 Little Bats

5 little bats went on a flight,

By the light of the moon one night.

Mommy Bat said: "squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, swack!"

But only 4 of her bats came back.

(repeat for 4,3,2,1)

-then-

Sad Mommy Bat went on a flight,

By the light of the moon one night.

Mommy Bat said: "squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, swack!" (pretending to cry)

....long pause....

And ALL of her 5 little bats came back!

 

Ms. Marianne had 5 little bats and a Mommy Bat for us to act out the song with. Each of us sat down when our bat's number had flown away. When everyone was sitting, we sang the last verse and pretended to cry with Mommy Bat and then all jumped up to fly our bats around the room again!

 

We wanted to take the bats home with us, but Ms. Marianne surprised us by helping us to make our own bats! We traced our feet and hands on black paper and (with lots of help!) cut them out. We glued everything together and added two googly eyes. They just didn't look Halloween-ish enough, so Ms. Marianne pulled out some candy corn and we put 'fangs' on our bats to make them vampire bats.

To practice sorting by size, we colored a picture of a pumpkin patch. The small pumpkins were green because they weren't ripe yet, the medium size pumpkins were orange and ready to pick, and the large pumpkins were special, "ghost" pumpkins that we had to draw faces on. We showed so much creativity in the scary, pretty and funny faces we drew! These papers are in our portfolios because we all did such a great job.


Our letter this week is Hh, for Halloween! We talked about what the capital and lowercase Hh's look like and did a funny "quiet laugh" (/h/ /h/ /h/!) to practice the sound. We created our letter wall with pictures and words that start with Hh and also learned 3 new sight words for the week- here, have & he. Our reading practice is sentences that are made up of the words we know and have blanks that we can fill in. For example: "I look like __________."

On Wednesday, we really focused hard on blending sounds together to make words. CVC words, if you didn't know, are Consonant-Vowel-Consonant words (like c-a-t or f-a-n) that are easy for little ones to decode when beginning to read. This week we've been studying word families: -at and -it. We "built" words by keeping the ending and switching out the first letter to create new words. This is something that we'll continue to do throughout the year as we build our confidence in reading... but it sure is fun to see the excited looks on everyone's faces as they realize that they CAN read words! CVC words in conjunction with sight words are wonderful ways to practice reading at home too- especially with an older sibling or family member.

Another game was re-introduced this week, one that received blank stares the first week of school! :) Ms. Marianne cut up capital & lowercase letters and put them into separate jack-o-lantern buckets. As a kid pulled a letter out of the bucket, they had a BINGO style paper that had matching letters on it. They had to match up the drawn letter with the letters on the paper and then stamp the letter on the paper. We each had a different bucket and we switched throughout the week so we got a chance to practice matching both capital and lowercase letters. Ms. Marianne was so impressed with how much we've grown already in letter recognition these last couple of months. Many of us were even saying the letter name and sound as we stamped it! Soon we'll work on matching capital to lowercase letters.


 On Wednesday, we read Skeleton Hiccups by Margery Cuyler. It's a funny book about a skeleton that can't get rid of the hiccups! We made our own skeletons out of Q-tips and added a jack-o-lantern that we made just for fun. We talked about why the "normal" ways of getting rid of the hiccups wouldn't work for the skeleton (holding breath: no lungs! drink water: it goes right through his jaw! etc) and the kids all loved this. :) Ask me what the "cure" for Skeleton's hiccups was. Our predictions were WAY off when we stopped to think ahead when reading- it was pretty funny what we said would happen, but didn't!

Thursday was Halloween. What fun! Some of us came in costume, or part of a costume. We read a great book called The Legend of Spookley the Square Pumpkin by Joe Troiano. This book is all about appreciating differences and not judging others by what they look like. We discussed how everyone is special- no matter what they look like, and that what matters most is how we act and what we do toward others. Spookley was a great example of that! To celebrate our differences, we each chose our favorite color paper to make our own square pumpkins. Some of our pumpkins were pink, others were pink and purple, and still more were brown. Some were even rectangular instead of square! We decorated them with markers beyond the plain paper covering and each ended up with a beautifully different pumpkin of our own to remind us of the lesson we learned about individuality from Spookley.

 

We read another book that is one of Ms. Marianne's favorites for Halloween. It's called The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything by Linda D. Williams. In the book, which seems like it's going to be a scary one, the little old lady's bravery is challenged by various articles of clothing and a giant pumpkin head that are following her home and trying to scare her! She comes up with a plan to put the clothing and pumpkin head to work scaring the crows out of her garden instead.

The repetitive-ness of this story allow for lots of class participation! Each time a piece is added, all the other pieces repeat their sounds in order as they follow the little old lady home. Our class loved being able to join in and yell what the pieces were doing! We also got to act out the story today- each of us being a piece of the story and acting out the sounds that the it made. The pieces were:

2 shoes that go "CLOMP CLOMP!"

1 pair of pants that go "WIGGLE WIGGLE!"

1 shirt that goes "SHAKE SHAKE!"

1 pair of gloves that go "CLAP CLAP!"

1 tall black hat that goes "NOD NOD!" and

1 scary pumpkin head that goes... "BOO BOO!"

In the end, we all put our pieces together to make a scarecrow outside Ms. Marianne's house.

What a great week this has been! I can't wait for next week. :)

Love,

Your Child

and

Ms. Marianne

 

 

 



Pumpkin Patch

Hi Mom!

What a great week. It was so full of learning and fun! Our theme this week was pumpkins.

Our first day this week, we learned 5 Little Pumpkins and created an art project where we stamped pumpkins and a moon with sponges and created vines by curling strips of green paper on our pencils. Our fine motor skills are improving so much!

The poem goes like this:

5 Little Pumpkins

There were 5 little pumpkins in a patch all alone.

The 1st one said, “I wish a child would take me home!”

The 2nd one said, “Don’t you worry, fuss, or fret!”

The 3rd one said, “I’m as orange as I can get!”

The 4th one said, “I see children by the house!”

The 5th one said, “Sh-sh-sh! Let’s be quiet as a mouse!”

Then the children picked the pumpkins from the patch with such delight~

The pumpkins are going home to be carved for Halloween night!

One of my very favorite things about preschool is the friends I've made. We're always nice to each other and help each other when we need it. Ms. Marianne is so proud of us for being such great friends! She loves to see us jump up and say "I can help you do that!" :)

Did you smell the play dough that I brought home this week? It's made from pumpkin puree, spices and flour. It smells like pumpkin pie! Ms. Marianne made it for us to play with and make "pumpkins" out of. We had such a great time using our imaginations as we squished, kneaded, rolled and pinched our dough. I brought a bag home... if it's refrigerated, it'll last for about a week (because it's totally natural!) 

 Our main focus this week in Science was the life cycle of a pumpkin. We read books, handled real life pumpkins and seeds and visited the pumpkin patch at V. Farms! We discussed how a pumpkin starts as a seed, grows into a spout, then a plant vine. Flowers bloom on the vine and then green pumpkins begin to grow. When the green pumpkins turn orange, they're ready to harvest for people to buy and make into pumpkin pies and jack-o-lanterns. To practice explaining and better understand this life cycle, we created a pumpkin craft that had a "vine" extending from a ripe, orange pumpkin that had been made into a jack-o-lantern. Every so often along the vine was a circle that illustrated a part of the life cycle. When you loop the vine around to create a circle with the jack-o-lantern, you can see the life cycle! We can practice telling the sequence of the life of a pumpkin by following the vine from the seed end to the jack-o-lantern end.

 Our biggest, best activity for this week was our trip to the pumpkin patch. This field trip was awesome! Our family members came with us and shared in the fun. Here are some pictures of our pumpkin themed adventures: we played games, bounced in the bounce house and on the moon bounce (a GIANT, air-filled pillow),

 

climbed to the top of the Tire Mountain,

 "milked a cow",

rode the train,

 

rode the giant slide with Ms. Marianne (so fun!!), 

 

raced rubber duckies at the water pump, 

 

rode the train,

 

found our way through the corn maze,  

 

 and picked out a miniature pumpkin, just for us!

What a day!

  

  One other neat thing that we did this week was practiced our sight words (and learned the new ones: is, see & my) by playing a game. Whomever could shout out the word that Ms. Marianne held up first got to keep the card with the word on it. Whomever collected the most cards won the game. N was our winner this week! You can definitely tell she's been practicing her sight words at home.

Way to go!

Next week will be a Halloween theme, since Thursday is the holiday. I can wear my costume if I want, but we'll be having a regular learning day- complete with a fun, active reading experience that'll require lots of movement, so we have to plan accordingly. :)

Love,

Your Child

and

Ms. Marianne

Apples, Apples, Apples!

Hi Mom,

Tree trunk at the bottom
Leaves at the top,
Apples falling off the tree,
Plop, plop PLOP!

This week was all about apples for preschool. We learned this poem about an apple tree. It took us lots of practice, but we even memorized it with hand gestures!


 With the weather being so beautiful now that it's fall, we spent some time outside. We made a huge apple tree to display our poem by stamping handprints in green for the leaves and in brown for the trunk. Then we added apples by slicing a real one in half and stamping with it! We all love to paint and we laughed because it tickled when Ms. Marianne painted our hands (and arms later on for our own trees!) to stamp with.

We discussed the life cycle of an apple- from seed to sapling to mature tree to blossom to apple to harvest and back to seed again. Sapling was a new word for us and we did a great job remembering it! Outside, we painted apple trees of our own with apples on them that showed the cycle, which we had to put in order using our sequencing skills and by looking at the non-fiction books in our library if we got stuck.

We observed that apples come in many colors and combinations of colors. Red, yellow and green apples are the basic colors that apples grow in. We explored all of these types of apples this week. We used our senses to see, smell, touch and taste all of them! Our reading practice included new words: am, and & like. Our sentences were all about apples! During our exploration of apples, we sampled each apple type and graphed our favorite type- our class likes red apples the best!

To reinforce the life cycle of an apple, we cut apples in half and looked at the seeds. Did you know there's a star hiding inside every apple? That was fun to discover. :)

Each of us created a book of our very own about the different kinds of apples.  Our books help us to read one word at a time by placing a finger on the dot under each word as we read. The books use our sight words that we're learning (I, see, a, color words, apple, etc.) and help to build our confidence as we learn to read and handle books. We illustrated our books by using our halved apples to stamp with again. 

Our final learning adventure of the week was to create- from scratch- our very own apple pie! We read / watched The Apple Pie Tree, by Zoe Hall and discussed again how the apples come to be. Here is a link to watch it again with our family! http://youtu.be/VL5EIhU_UPk?t=30s

 

Each of us had a special job to do to make our pie, and we got to switch jobs so everyone got a turn to do almost everything else. We measured spices, rolled pie dough, peeled and cut up apples (using butter knives!) and mixed them with the spices and sugar. When the apples were in the crust, we all got a turn at fluting the edges of the crust (making the pretty, ruffled design around the edge) and then Ms. Marianne put it in the oven. While we waited for it to bake, we practiced our poem again and read more books about apples.  

 It was so hard to wait for the 50 minute baking time to pass, but it was worth it to taste that yummy, sweet and bubbly apple filling inside the crumbly crust. :) We were all so proud of our pie!

Next week we will be focusing on pumpkins and visiting the pumpkin patch! I can't wait!

Love,

Your Child

and

Ms. Marianne