Building haunted houses is a long-standing tradition with the older classes at Small Friends, and on Monday the kids dove in with confidence and creativity. They remembered the houses they made last spring and were excited to have another chance to create something out of wood.
On Wednesday they finished building and started painting. Some friends wanted to completely cover their houses and others took a more minimalist approach.
By Friday they were ready to begin decorating their houses with webs, Halloween garlands, skeletons, bats, spiders and more! We didn't have time for everyone to finish, so that is first up on Monday. Before we send houses home, we will take pictures and have the children do dictations about them for their notebooks. They all look SO GREAT!
Our other parent activities this week were all about spiders! On Monday children cut paper webs in order to "rescue" the bugs that were propped on top without accidentally releasing the spider in the middle. This was a great opportunity to practice using scissors and do a little critical thinking.
Wednesday they played a game where they WERE the spiders, rolling dice to find out how many insects they could go in and extract from the life-size web.
On Friday they used vinegar to excavate spider rings from "eggs" made out of shaving cream and baking soda. Lots of fizzy, fabulous fun!
Around the room there were several new Halloween activities. In the water tub itsy, bitsy spiders were washed down the water spout with great gusto.
At the play dough table, there were fangs, eyeballs and other accessories for monstrous creations.
At the building table there were bones and spongy, spiky, rubbery shapes that kids could connect together in all kinds of combinations.
We added black and orange glitter balls and bendy skeletons to the other toys that were in the texture table.
We put the Perler beads out and they were a hit!
Here are some of the other ways the kids spent their free time this week:
During our literacy time we read, Great Big Pumpkin, Nightmare in My Closet, Aminal (yes, that's spelled correctly), Skeleton For Dinner, Walter's Wonderful Web, and Teacher Lisa told a story about a bellybutton snatcher. We sang "Late Last Night" and "Skin and Bones". On Friday we had a Friendship Circle and everyone shared something that they had enjoyed doing with a friend that day.
We did deep breathing exercises using our imaginary cauldrons and continued to practice our Halloween yoga flow series.
We heard from our final two friends about their Summer Memory journals.
Another week of beautiful, sunny weather made going outside extra enjoyable!
Next week we will finish our haunted houses, make magic potions, crawl through the haunted tunnel and so much more!
Thanks for sharing your kiddos with us - we sure enjoy our mornings with them!
See you soon,
Lisa and Sheri
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