Halloween Party!

  On the 28th and 29th each group had a Halloween Party!  We read "Where's my Mummy?" during Circle Time.  The Tuesday kidlets thought it was pretty funny that the mummy had met all these scary creatures while looking for his mummy, but was scared of mouse!  We learned a new song called "Five Little Pumpkins", and both groups had fun acting out the actions with the song.  We then found some other Halloween songs on Youtube, and spent some time dancing to get rid of all our excess energy that we had.

On Tuesday, we two princesses, a monkey, and Scooby Doo!

We had a lot of Spider-Man's come on Wednesday! The Hulk even came, but didn't want to be in the picture.

       For our craft, the children were able to choose a coloured piece of construction paper and stick foam Halloween stickers on it.  It always amazes me at how different their pictures are!  Some stacked their stickers, some placed them wherever there was room, and one little guy made quite the picture with his stickers!

   After our craft, we got to play with pumpkin guts!  The kids had so much fun squishing the pumpkin inside the bags.  That was, until they squished it so hard, and accidentally popped the bag!  They had quite the surprise on their face to discover pumpkin guts on their hands!

   Next we made a ghost!  We took poured some vinegar into a bottle, then added some baking soda into a white balloon.  Then we put the balloon on the bottle, and dumped the baking soda inside!  The kids had such a hoot!  Both groups wanted to do it 3 times!  On the third time, we wanted to try and blow up the ghost so big that he would pop.  But, instead of popping him we ended up filling him with the baking soda and vinegar foam.  Which was okay, because that meant he was able to hang out around preschool for the remainder of the day.

   The best part of our Halloween Party was the mystery bags!  I had filled brown paper bags with monster teeth (popcorn seeds), witches fingers (carrot sticks), eyeballs (peeled grapes), and brains (cooked speghetti that I even dyed pink for added effect).  The children weren't allowed to look in the bags, they were just told of the gross thing hidden inside and encouraged to reach in and touch it.  The Tuesday group had such fun!  They touched everything, even the brains!  The Wednesday group, not so much.  They touched the monster teeth, witches fingers, and eyeballs.  Jack was the first to touch the eyeballs, and his reaction was full of excitement, grossness, and curiousity!  I wish I had been able to catch it on camera! I don't think he was expecting to touch something slimy inside the bag!  No one wanted to touch the brains though!  Even after I had shown them what the brains really were, they didn't want to touch them!

September

Wow! Our first month of preschool for the 2014/2015 school year has quickly come and gone! During this month the kiddos and I had so much fun learning about our new friends, manners, emotions, and so much more!  We've worked on social skills, fine motor skills, and writing/literacy skills, along with learning about our daily theme.  And of course, we had some time to just have fun!

   We started off our year learning about ourselves and our friends.  Each child shared a little bit about themselves each day.  We learned what our friends liked to do, what they liked to eat, and their favourite colours along with many other things about them.  We used our blocks in the block centre to build a tower to measure how tall we are, then compare our heights with our friends. We made "friendships" for each friend, and listed some of the nice things we noticed about our friend.  We read "Rainbow Fish" and discussed what it means to be a good friend.  The children enjoyed making their own rainbow fish out of coffee filters, markers, and eye droppers.  They thought it was fascinating to see the colours run together once the water was added.

   We even got to learn about their families!  Each child was asked to bring in a picture of their family to put on our wall.  Before their picture was put up, everyone had a chance to talk about who was in their family, and share some of the fun things they liked to do as family.  The kidlets had fun making a popsicle puppet for each of their family members. Some friends brought in pictures of their pets, and enjoyed telling everyone all about their pet.

    We moved on to learn about our bodies, first focusing on what makes us different.  We learned that we all are similar (we all have 2 eyes, 2 ears, hair, etc) but those things can be different.  Some of us have blonde hair, and some of us have brown eyes.  The children had fun looking in mirrors to figure out what physical features they have, and how they're features are different from another's features.  We made collages out of tissue paper, and then compared how everyone's collage was unique just like them!

   We then talked about what we can do with our bodies, how to take care of them, and that our bodies are made up of bones.  A skeleton came to visit us at preschool for a few days, and the children thought he looked pretty weird to have no skin.  We used him as a puzzle, and worked together to try and fit all of our bones back together.  We made a copy of our hands and gave ourselves some bones using q-tips and glue.  Apparently some children have a crazy amount of bones!  And others don't think they have too many bones.  We talked about what we should cover our bodies with to keep them safe, and the children enjoyed matching clothing to the appropriate body part it protects.  We also talked about what we should eat.  We made a chart titled "Healthy Food" and "Junk Food", and each child got a turn flipping a card then placing it in the appropriate category.  We had some good laughs as some children tried to get away with saying candy was "Healthy Food".

   We also talked about our 5 senses.  Some of the children LOVED finger painting, others were a bit unsure and preferred to use the paintbrush.   All of the children loved playing our guessing game!  I had all the children sit at the table, and showed them 5 brown paper bags.  Inside each bag was something different, and I went around to each child and they stuck their hand in the bag to feel what was inside to try and guess what it was.  They had so much fun trying to use their sense of touch to figure out what was in the bags!  And what a surprise it was when the object was revealed after everyone had a turn!

   We then moved onto talk about our emotions.  We used easter eggs with faces to talk about what kind of emotions we have.  The children had fun mixing up the eggs, and creating some very interesting emotions!  We talked about what was a good way to show our emotions, and what was a bad way.  The children thought it was really fun when we played a game to showcase our emotions.  I would say an emotion (ie:scared) and they would have lots of giggles trying to act out the emotions.  For our craft, we used dry pasta noodles to make faces.  Most of our faces didn't really look like faces, but the kidlets had a fun time making up their goofy faces.
 

August

   Our last month of Summer Preschool has come to a close.  The kids and I have had so much fun exploring topics together and getting to know one another.

August 12th- Spiders
   We read "The Very Busy Spider" by Eric Carle in Circle Time.  The children enjoyed looking at the colourful illustrations and guessing what the spider was going to do.  Afterwards, we went outside to go on a spider hunt.  We brought our magnifying classes outside with us to help get a better look at those creepy crawlers!  We spotted one on his web, and the children took turns inspecting it with their magnifying glasses.  Then, we took a poll during snacktime to see how liked spiders.  Turns out, everyone likes spiders except for me!  We learned that spiders have 8 legs, and they use their webs to catch insects to eat.  We used our handprints to make our very own spiders!  The children had a lot of fun gluing googly eyes on them afterwards, since spiders have lots of eyes!  While we waited for mums, we played with play-doh and a mix of open ended objects.  The children had a blast using the objects to create a very unique creation!

August 19th-Dragonflies
   We watched a Youtube video about dragonflies, and learned that they eat pesky insects like mosquitos! We learned about their different body parts, and that they have 6 legs and 4 wings.  Afterwards, we went outside to look for dragonflies.  We used the butterfly nets to catch them, but they were just too fast!!  We saw lots outside, but unfortunately weren't able to catch any to examine with our magnifying glasses.  We used popsicle sticks to make a dragonfly magnet.  The children had a lot of fun adding glitter to their dragonflies, the table (and the sink) was pretty messy when we were done!  The children enjoyed the play-doh activity so much from last day, that they requested to do it again!

August 26th-The Science Centre!
   As our Summer Program windup, we went to the Science Centre.  The children had a ton of fun checking out all the exhibits.  We were able to watch a static electricity show, and they kids were able to pet a gecko!  The children all got to be volunteers for the static electricity show, and thought it was pretty funny to watch their hair go all silly from the static.