M is for Monsters and Happy Halloween!

M is for monsters! And, we made our own colorful, hairy, multiple eyed monsters out of the letter M this week. We had fun watching our paper go through the shredding machine to make our fur.

We also reviewed color mixing this week with this color mixing experiment that I found on pinterest. Notice how our paper towels are shaped into the letter M?

Which M will win? I adapted this idea from one that I saw in a Kindergarten classroom that I volunteered in. I used large dice and covered them in Capital and lowercase M's, and then we rolled the die and used our dot markers to mark which M it landed on. We continued this until we had a winner!

In honor of Halloween, we continued our lesson on monsters and played a game called Go Away Monster.

and, for a literacy center, we fed cookie monster! But, it wasn't only cookies that he ate, he also ate every letter of the alphabet!

This center was a snap! We had the numbers 1-10 on a colorful block, and we took our picture blocks 

and snapped the correct amount onto each number.

BUT, enough with the work, and onto the fun....our Halloween party!

We rotated from 3 Halloween games at our Halloween party. One was a pumpkin ping pong toss. We tried to toss our ping pong balls into the pumpkins mouth or eyes.

We had a skeleton relay.

And, we had Halloween mini golf.

Happy Halloween!

Song of the week:

Mr. Jack-O-Lantern

Mr. Jack-o-lantern

Is very round and fat.

He has a yellow candle

Tucked underneath his hat.

It makes his face look scary

and very, very bright

When he winks and smiles at me 

On spooky Halloween night!

A BIG thank you to all the parent volunteers!! I really could not do these parties without your help! 

Dinosaur Discoveries!

Volcanoes, and dinosaurs, and fossils, oh my! Last week we talked about when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, how many different kinds there were, and how scientists know this from discovering their fossils. Check out this cute fossil craft we made! I found the idea and outline for this here.

And, since you can't possibly talk about dinosaur bones without digging for some, we had some hidden in our sand table and got to have our own fossil dig!

We also made our own fossil imprints and letter prints with our playdough, using magnetic letters and our dinosaur skeletons.

We made our own volcanoes, and each had our own turn to make it erupt. We discussed the many reasons dinosaurs may be extinct, including volcanic activity. This activity was set up by simply putting playdough around a flower vase, and then using red colored vinegar and baking soda for the eruptions.

And, boy did they think this was neat! Check out Zachary, just after one of the eruptions!

For a math center, we made these dinosaur puzzles, with our 1-10 number recognition skills. 

We also did some graphing this week. I had 5 different colored dinosaurs in our hide-and-seek bag, and the kids were to take one out at a time, and then color a square on the corresponding color graph. As you can see below, Kali's black dinosaurs were appearing quite frequently.

We also used our tools, picks, and brushes to see what dino discoveries we could find in the rocks. This dino dig center was a kit I bought from Lakeshore Learning, along with some rocks I made myself following this recipe. It worked perfectly! Just give plenty of time for the rocks to dry out, a couple of days at least.

And, we had our play mats, dinosaurs, rocks, trees, and volcanoes out for creative play!

We are well on our way to learning each letter of the alphabet, and for this dino-mite activity, we practiced our uppercase to lowercase alphabet recognition. Each dinosaur was cut in half, in different patterns, and the kids had to build the dinosaurs back together by matching the uppercase letter to its lowercase counterpart.

We also used some letter strips and magnetic letters to complete our alphabet. Some letters were missing on each letter strip, and the kids tried to find the missing letter by either singing the alphabet , or looking at our alpablet train on our wall.

Lexi is having a blast coloring some dinosaurs at with our stencils!

And books! We had some of our favorite dinosaur books at this center, and even had some dinosaur puppets to help us act them out!

Check out these cute dinosaur hats we made for an art project too! Now that's what we call a long-neck!

Book of the week: 3 Little Dinosaurs by Charles Fuge

Song of the week:

12 Little Dinosaurs sitting on the floor

The first one wore (whatever color that child was wearing)

and he/she said (the child I pointed to would give their loudest ROAR!)

We continued counting down to 1 until every child had their turn to Roar!