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,
Love,
Your Child
and
Ms. Marianne
