Happy Halloween!

Their cuteness takes my breath away most days. Halloween is no exception.

Cutest Pumpkin in the World

Before carving pumpkins the other night, I told Porter to draw his design. He drew a sad face with an owie on his head because he wanted to "surprise everyone with how scary his pumpkin is" (his words).

 

After cleaning it out, Porter helped me cut it to look like his drawing. He did the eyes and owie practically on his own. I helped on the mouth.

And it is, by far, the cutest pumpkin I've ever seen! I can't get over it. I love my cute little pumpkin artist!

Preschool: Weather + Letter F

WEATHER LESSON

We spent about 10-15 minutes on each of the four types of weather we learned about. For each, we read a book, recorded the weather on our paper with a picture, then did some sort of experiment to learn about it. Here it is . . .

Read Alouds

My beautiful drawings for the kids to copy. You don't need to say it; I should have been an artist. I know, I know. ;)

And the kids copied it. Believe it or not, folding the paper into fourths was probably the trickiest part of this activity. ;)

Sun Activity: Revolving the earth(s) around the sun. We may or may not have had 5+ earths revolving.

Then we threw in a little rotating while revolving. That got crazy.

shadow tag

Rain Cloud Experiment

Wind Experiment

Snow Experiment (aka, Snack): These are frozen CapriSuns all blended up. I'm so lucky it worked so well (I didn't try this out beforehand). But it ended up looking just like snow and it tasted really yummy! 

I told them the Nilla Wafers were suns. That one was a stretch.

LETTER F LESSON

F is for Frog

Song: Five Green and (Speckled) Frogs

Fishing for F Words

Reading the /f/ Sound with a Witch Finger

Kids Read Sounds with Witch Fingers (forgot to take pics of the kids doing this)

Read Aloud

Kids had to sort through pictures and only feed the frogs words that start with F.

I forgot to take any pictures when we were actually having the lesson. But luckily, Lucy happened to be playing with my phone and she took a couple pictures while the kids were actually there.

Train Ride

My kids LOVE trains. I booked a trip on a local historic train that does a little scenic ride around a nearby valley. Brian and I were so excited to take the kids on their first train ride. But just before our scheduled day, Brian came down with an awful stomach flu. We were so incredibly sad. But having already scheduled and rescheduled this ride, we decided I should take the kids without him. Instead, my parents got to come to fill his place and help out with the kids. I took lots of pictures for Brian. Here are a few of them . . .

she plugged her ears each time the train whistle blew, even though she really loved it

 very contemplative

We'll definitely go again someday when Brian can finally come. But at least now I can warn him about the deplorable lack of leg room.

Preschool: Letter B

Loved teaching this fun lesson! Here's what we did . . .

B is for Brown Bear

Fine Motor Development

Letter Recognition

Feeding B-Words to the Brown Bear

Read Aloud

Letter Puzzle

Making Brown Bear's Boo-Boos Better With Bb Band-Aids 

(kids had to think of a word that starts with B to put a band-aid on the bear)

Wearing Bb Band-Aids 

(earned by thinking of ANOTHER word that begins with B)

Snack (not pictured): Brown Bears (aka, chocolate Teddy Grahams)

Preschool: Handwriting, Names

Two months in, I'm finally getting around to posting pics for the other moms in Porter's preschool group. Here's what we did for the first lesson I taught in September . . .

name-writing pre-assessment + counting activity

self-starter: fine motor development

line-tracing worksheet

how to hold a pencil + how to write capital letters

read aloud to introduce writing names

*love, love, love this book. anyone who doesn't own it should go buy it. right now.

name monster: trace name . . .

. . . open it up . . .

. . . draw a monster.

these turned out soooo cute

snack: jell-o jiggler names