Easy Fall Themed Center

Here is one of the centers we did last week to continue our work on the season of fall. Each bare tree has a number at the bottom and the kids are responsible for putting the same number of leaves on the branches. For example, the 6 tree would have 6 leaves. The 8 tree would have 8 leaves. Pretty simple and a great way to work on number recognition. 

 You will need to provide your students with a variety of bare trees with numbers below them and cut out leaves for them to put onto the tree. 

G is for Growing Grass

 We are so excited to have some new class members in our class. They aren't the smartest bunch in the class, but they are going to have some awesome hair in a couple of weeks!

Meet the Grass Heads

We planted these during letter G week and talked about how seeds grow. Since grass starts with G, we decided to plant some. To make it more fun, we added faces to our containers and the kids are having fun watching their hair grow. It's like the poor man's chia pet. ; )

This is what they look like after a week and a half. (Sorry for the poor quality picture. I think I might need to ask Santa for a new camera this Christmas. )

The cool thing about these guys (once their hair grows in) is you can practice those awesome scissors skills like we talked about before, here. The kids can cut their hair or style it. however they want. It's pretty fun! I'll keep you posted on how they are doing. 

 Making one is pretty easy too! 

• Print out some cartoon faces. I printed some out from here. 
• Glue them onto a clear cup. You want to use clear because then you can see the roots grow.
• Add some dirt, a thick layer of grass seeds, then another layer of dirt. 
• Water it about once a day and watch your grass heads grow their own hair!

Halloween

Every year I plan to post our holiday activities before the holiday so people can use them if they want. And every year, I get busy and it doesn't happen. Sorry everyone. To make up for it, I'll include a video of my cuties performing some Halloween stuff for their parents.

Here's one of the "healthy" halloween snacks we had when we made candy corn mosaics.

Candy corn fruit! It's made with pineapple, oranges, and whipped cream.

Here are some ghosts we made with real ghost fluff. ;)

 Here's our Frankenstein craft we made

after reading one of my favorite books, Even Monsters Need Haircuts by Matthew McElligott. Here's a sample page from inside the book.  I'm telling you, it's awesome! The pictures are so much fun.

Here is a song we sung

I'm a mean old witch with a hat!
I ride on my broomstick with my cat!
My nose is pointy and my chin is too.
You better watch out or I might scare you . . . Boo!

and a poem we recited

5 Little Pumpkins

Five little pumpkins sitting on a gate.
The first one said, "Oh my, it's getting late."
The second one said, "There are witches in the air."
The third one said, "But we don't care!"
The fourth one said, "Let's run and run and run."
The fifth one said, "We're ready for some fun!"
Then OOOhh went the wind, 
And out went the lights,
And the five little pumpkins rolled out of sight.

Happy Halloween!

Fall!

I am so excited to be in a place that has seasons! Back in Arizona, we had summer and slightly cooler summer. I loved my time there, but I also love to see the leaves change and the mountains slowly getting whiter and whiter as the snow line moves down the mountain. It's beautiful. If you have never visited Utah, it is a beautiful place to visit. So many opportunities for outdoor sports and such amazing scenery. Anyway, I'll get off my travel guide and get back to preschool.

So, fall - love it! I even like raking the leaves. Does that make me a crazy person? Oh well. This year, we are learning about what the seasons are and what the weather is like during those seasons. As an introduction, I pulled out a bunch of magazine pages with pictures of different seasons. The kids each took a couple of the pages, cut out the pictures, then taped them to one of four posters - spring, summer, fall, winter.

Then, we started our seasons book. I have blogged about this before, but I didn't really include any pictures so I hope to remedy that this year. Each season, we will add a new page to our book and at the end of the year they will be able to take it home. We read the book, Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf by Lois Ehlert. Then I gave each student a tree outline. They added fall leaves in red, yellow, and orange tissue paper. 

They wrapped tissue paper squares around the end of a pencil, dipped it in glue, and put it on their tree. 

Here's the finished product! We'll make sure to add our other seasons as we do them. 

D is for . . .

Goodness, where does the time go? I can't believe how quickly the weeks fly by!

. . . dump!

I hung a bucket in the doorway (To do this I put a nail above the door frame where you wouldn't see the hole when I pulled it out.)

I put a box of things out, some that started with the letter d and some that didn't. The kids and I identified which things made a "duh" sound at the beginning of the word and put them into the bucket.

Once the bucket was full, the kids dumped it out!

. . . dots & diamonds!

We read a really fun story about making pictures using dots. Then we made our own pictures with dots and diamonds. 

. . . drawing!

We played simon says, drawing style! The kids practiced drawing different shapes and identifying vocab words like above, under, next to, center, etc. I gave instructions of what and where they were to draw. The end picture ended up being a monster. (Of course since Halloween was right around the corner!)