Five Little Pumpkins...

We started out this week talking about apples and then moved on to pumpkins by the end of the week.  However, before we could talk about apples or pumpkins or any other fall objects, we need to praise our Star of the Week.  He did a terrific job on his poster and presented it to the class with pride.

Star of the Week posters are always terrific ways to start the week and the children are always beaming as we ask them questions about what they drew, or who a photograph might be of or what their plans are for the future.  We hope that once these posters go home, you hang them in a place where your child can be reminded of the good work he/she did to create these great projects.  

Back to the apples again; we showed the children a whole apple, half an apple and a quarter of an apple and asked them what they thought would turn brown first.  Many children guessed a variety of the above then we set it aside to look at at the end of the preschool day.  

This is a great little taste of science anyone can do at home.  If you want to take it a step further, place lemon juice on top of one and give them four options.  Then you can talk about oxidation with them when they see the lemon keeps the apple whiter longer. Many adults think children this young can't handle such big words as oxidation, but if you present the word to the child and show them what it means, you would be amazed at what information their little brains can hold!

 After talking about apples, we played a spelling game with the children while the teachers set up the 'apple trees' for our math activity.

 

Every letter that is used to make up every preschooler's name was placed on a ghost in the room and each child used their memory (and name tags) to walk around the room with their teachers and collect the ghosts carrying the letters of their name.  When finished, they brought their ghosts to the circle to check the spelling of their name with a teacher then they were allowed to bring their ghosts home to practice spelling their names with family.

Once everyone found the letters of their names, our apple trees were ready for picking!  We attached green contact paper to the walls and gave children 'apple bushels' to fill.  They picked apples from the trees and found some that had already fallen on the ground too.

  

After that, the children worked together with teachers to sort their apples by color (green yellow or red) then count them to find the total apples picked as well as to see which color they had the most or least of on their trip apple picking. 

 

 We loved playing this game with the children and many of the teachers had a fun time practicing this game and getting the 'apples' (which were pom poms) to stay on the tree.  If you don't have contact paper at home, scotch tape will work too. 

Once they finished picking and sorting their apples they turned to 'climb' the tree taped to the floor to 'pick some leaves' then try to throw them into our Bozo Buckets. 
The children then climbed through the 'spider web' at the end of the hallway.If you have a good doorway and some yarn, you can have your children work on their critical thinking skills while they move through the yarn you taped across your doorway.  This is fall fun for the whole family and if you use tape, you can throw small toy bugs into the web to try to 'catch' them as well.

While some of our preschoolers were working on their apple picking in the hallway, the children inside the room were busy singing songs about picking apples and dancing like scarecrows.  

Many of these songs aren't just cute, but work a child's language building skills through rhyming and physical movement while acting out the moves the characters sing about in their songs.

After everyone moved from one station to the next, we changed teachers and worked on our letter of the day then moved on to science.  This week, the teacher took time to "blow up a pumpkin!" 
However, this is not what you might think. She drew a pumpkin face on an orange balloon and attached it to a water bottle containing vinegar.  We discussed what happens when vinegar is mixed with a certain ingredient we often use when making cookies-baking soda.  
We reminded the preschoolers that baking soda is the ingredient in cookies that helps them puff up in the oven and then told them the 'pumpkin' had some inside him.  
As she turned him right side up, the baking soda inside him sprinkled into the vinegar mixing and creating gas.  This "blew up" our 'pumpkin'!




After this awesome 'trick'the children split up into stations again to go to story time and pattern math with leaves.  After identifying the colors of the leaves, the children created patterns to see if their friends could come up with the next color in their row.
Later this week we talked about bats and worked on a bat project with bat stencils placed on a page and then painted over.  When the bat image is peeled off, the image of bats will appear!

We created a 'magical brew' just like a witch by using 'Squishy Baff' in our water table. 
 The children took the 'magical ingredients' and sprinkled them into the water table and as we mixed the water up, we saw it turn into red goo!  To change the goo back into water, we added another 'magical ingredient' and after mixing once more, we got our water back!  Lots of fun and laughs were had by all, to see the commercial for this product, click here.

Our pumpkin art this week allowed us to add candy corn to pumpkins that corresponded with numbers given to the children by their teachers.

 While some children worked on this project, others played a game of Simon Says that involved them rolling a block the teachers labeled with movements more relative to our monthly theme. Some children had to crawl like spiders and others had to tip-toe like skeletons, etc.

The last fun science experiment this week was to color a pumpkin using a hair dryer and crayons!  The teachers glued crayons to the top of a pumpkin and then applied heat in front of the children to melt the crayons for a rainbow affect.  If you are looking to try this at home, click here for the directions.(See, I told you we ended with pumpkins!)

 

What's Coming Up?

Trick or Treat with Pirate Pete is a FREE event at Palatine High School on October 30th from 5:00-6:30 PM.

Our Halloween party will be Friday, October 31st in the preschool room from 9:30 -10:45 AM.  Please arrive with your child and be sure he/she is in costume (you can dress up too if you would like to do so.)  The teachers will take your treats and then you will be welcome to have a treat and enjoy the room decorations and a Halloween Story.  

Everyone will trick or treat around the school with the teachers for a few treats to take home and enjoy.  If you haven't sent in your RSVP, please do so in order for us to ensure we have enough plates and tricks and treats for everyone this day.

Autumn leaves are falling down...

Even with no preschool on Columbus Day we packed in a ton of fall fun into this week. After our normal morning routine, we started talking about pumpkins and other fun things we see in October. 

We decided to make some creepy goo for a science experiment. Anytime we tell the children we will be making something 'gooey' they all giggle with delight. But, this time we decided to make sure we did not have to messy hands (many of our young preschoolers do not like to get 'messy') and made our goo in plastic bags to take home. 

This is a very easy science experiment you can do at home and you don't need plastic baggies to do it. If you are willing to get a little messy, just grab a bowl, glue, liquid starch, and maybe a little bit of watercolor paint to change it colors. We do not recommend food coloring because it is not very easy to get off of the hands. It's always better if you keep liquid watercolor paints on hand and use them for child-friendly activities because those are washable. 

This week we also built skeletons out of straws. There are many ways you can do this with your child. The biggest thing to remember is your child's skeleton will not look like a skeleton. 

Some of our preschoolers put a giant pile of glue in the middle of the page and then place many of our [straw] bones on top. The important part of this lesson was to talk about the word 'skeleton' and to help the children understand the word skeleton is what we use to describe the bones in our bodies. As the children created their skeletons, the teachers would use the word often to encourage the children to do the same.

For some traveling math this week we went around the room and counted witches cauldron's, pumpkins, Frankenstein's, and trees. Then we went back to the circle to talk about which item we had the most of and of which item we had the least. 

If you will remember, we have been working on the idea of most and least since preschool started. I am happy to say more and more of our preschoolers are showing they understand the concept of most and least.

When the second group of teachers enter the classroom the children know our first activity is always Letter of the Day. One of the days this week we talked about the letter O. 


After that, we decided to have the preschoolers make owls (O is for Owl). These owls were a lot of fun for the children to create and once they attached the wings they flew them about the classroom.

Where do we find so many cute craft projects?  Pinterest, of course!  If you haven't started following our boards, but have a Pinterest account, you can follow Kris Stary and check out all we find to do during school and more!




Once we were finished with our owls, we started talking about squirrels. We talked about how squirrels are starting to gather nuts for the winter and then the preschoolers went to the tables to count out acorns to give squirrels. 

Each child got a cup with a number on it and a picture of a squirrel. They had to find the correct number of acorns and place them by the cup to feed the squirrel.  
The best part about this activity was the fact that the teacher who created it did so expecting to collect the cups and acorns at the end of the activity, but the children loved it so much they asked if they could keep their squirrels to bring home.  She was so glad they enjoyed the activity so much she gladly sent them home.

Later we talked about other animals that are starting to find shelter for the winter. The children were given pictures of animals and their homes and asked to trace the lines to bring the animal to its correct home. The best part of this is how well our preschoolers are staying on the lines. These kinds of activities are terrific to build fine motor skills and improve writing quality.

We could not talk about animals finding their homes without singing, "The Cool Bear Hunt" song by Dr. Jean. As always, the children did a terrific job and enjoyed acting afraid of the bear and pretending to run away from his cave.

Later this week we created a volcano out of apples. The children repeated this activity over and over again with their teachers and it has only three simple ingredients. 

Core and apple and fill it with baking soda. Then pour vinegar on top and watch the magic! This is a cheap and fun science experiment the whole family will love!

After apple volcanoes, we read a story about 10 apples. The children had a great time counting the apples down from 10 with one of their teachers as she read the story. These kinds of subtraction books are both are a lot of fun for children and come in a variety of topics.

Later we took orange, white and yellow construction paper bits and glued them down in the shape of candy corn. The teachers had each section marked off in the paper to see if the preschoolers could re-create the image of candy corn shown to them before they started the activity. 

Remember, some preschoolers are new to school and new to the idea of following directions from a teacher. These types of arts and crafts projects are more about getting a child to figure out how to follow directions and less about the creativity.

After making candy corn, we encouraged more fine motor skill development by having the children draw lines going vertically instead of horizontally. This time, they traced lines to have leaves fall down from the tree; again building fine motor skills to improve writing quality.  

One thing we noticed was that this type of line was a bit tricky to some of our little pirates as we watched them try to turn the paper so they could draw horizontal lines again.  Based on this observation, you may see more vertical line work going home to help them practice more hand movements as they also work on holding their utensils correctly.

Like the candy corn activity, we decided to use torn up paper to create leaves for decorating our classroom for fall. However this time the preschoolers would be the ones to rip up the paper. While you may think your child is good at making messes at home, ripping paper is actually a very tough fine motor skill for some children. 


Many tore the paper into three or four pieces and started to give up. We worked with them encouraging them to tear the paper into pieces as small as they could go. 


After the children ripped up the paper, they brought it to a strip of contact paper laying sticky side up. The children were in charge of spreading out all of the torn pieces of paper to completely fill the sticky side until there was, "no sticky left". 

Once preschool was over, the teachers cut the contact paper into leaf shapes. We will be hanging these around the room to help decorate for the rest of this month. You will get to see them in our Halloween party on October 31st.

We had quite a lot of fun this day and decided it would be a good idea to hop various ways: up-and-down, fast, slow, high, on 1 foot, and then the other. Then we read the book, Who Hops to find out what other animals like to hop as much as we do.

What's Coming Up?

There will be NO PRESCHOOL in Wednesday, October 22nd due to an Early Dismissal for College Night.  Palatine High School hosts this each year and the school needs to get ready for the district to come and check out colleges for our Senior Class.

Trick or Treat with Pirate Pete will be Oct. 30th from 5:00-6:30 PM, so come and trick or treat indoors for FREE!

Our Halloween Party will be Friday, October 31st from 9:30 - 10:45 AM. An invitation went home on Friday along with an RSVP card.  Please remember to bring your child in costume and let us know if anyone else will be trick or treating with us so we do not run out of treats along the way.  We will head out and about the school together after we have treats int he classroom so please remember to bring no more than 12 of anything, we will have plenty to go around.

November will be here before we know it and so will our spring registration!  Remember that morning preschool extends to last from 9:30 - 11:55 so if you are looking to change to our afternoon session (1:00-2:30 PM) please email me so I can make arrangements to fill your spot.  Otherwise, it is assumed all current morning preschoolers will be staying in the morning.  If you know of anyone looking to join our ship, please forward them the link to our registration page and Pirate Pete Preschool Website for more information.