Halloween will be here before we know it. The next two weeks we will use the holiday to teach things like the letter H and the colors orange and black. We will also explore what it means for something to be real and not real – which is very important this time of year.
We started off our morning by coming into the kitchen and we each cooked a coffee cake in a cup. The children love cooking and you can teach so many things while you do it. There is measuring and counting and that fine motor grip on the spoon.
After cooking this morning and before I was able to get our table activities out the girls asked to color. You had heard my spill about not using coloring books but I guess it is ok if they ask for them. I loved to color when I was a little girl . I sometimes still do – great therapy ! 🙂 Why not coloring sheets you might wonder .” Reading the research of Victor Lowenfeld, we find out that coloring book pages can take almost all creative thinking away from 50-60% of children. The other 40% may be effected as well, but may have been nourished enough to at least maintain some creativity. In fact, if a child continually uses pre-made pages, he may never be satisfied with anything that he draws. He will be upset that his drawings look like a child’s drawings, not the adult drawings in coloring books.”
But still, if is a choice it is form of creativity , right ?
Some other activities that we had today were fun too ! We read ” Spookly the Square Pumpkin” and then made Spookly ! This is a wonderful book and the kids love it. It is also a good book to reinforce our shapes.
We also had new table activities like using tongs to search through a new sensory bowl with Halloween things in it. Using a tong to pick spiders and place them in an orange ice cube tray. With this activity the practice fine motor and one to one correlation.
If you know Aveary you know she doesn’t wear glasses. They all think Dillions are cool so we have a pair without lens that they can wear too.
We had sandwiches for lunch today with orange and black chips. Many of the kids left the black ones on their plate, I think they thought they were burnt.
Also, during circle time we did some new songs including the ” Monster Mash ” and ” I want Candy ! ” We read the story of Matt the ghost who kept changing colors. His friends would make fun of him and say ” Ho Ho Ho. Hee Hee Hee. You’re the funniest looking Ghost we ever did see. ” Stories like this give us the chance to talk about social issues like ” making fun of people. ”
If you wondered what in the world Randy and I were doing all weekend. We had a fabulous time. We were the keynotes for the Arkansas Early Childhood Associations Saturday morning general session. It was a blast. They presented us with framed Arkansas Travelers Certificates and we sold a LOT of CD’s Randy wrote a song about preschool teachers that has already been requested to be put behind a video presentation for next year. Getting together with other people that ” do what we do” always feels so great. It is hard to explain. But we are back refreshed and ready to try out some of the new things we learned in the sessions.