What a wonderful week the children have had so far!  Monday’s Halloween celebration began with candy math, led by our volunteer, Mr. Offerman!  He worked with small groups of children to sort and count various types of candy corn.  Once each child sorted the candy by type (bats, moons, pumpkin, etc..), they counted out how many of each they had, identified the number in writing and then either copied or traced that number.  Additionally, the children used the candy corn as a unit of measure, measuring Halloween pictures by laying pieces of candy the length or height of each pictures and again counting, identifying the number and writing or tracing the number symbol

Grandma Terry was our arts and crafts volunteer.  She helped children cut out ghost puppets and create small ghost stick puppets that sprang from a silver, spooky “house.”  She also helped the children cut and create moveable bat mobiles!  The children moved through the classroom during morning rotations, moving to different Halloween themed activities and working with various adults….all before the parade, lunch and party!

Thank you again to everyone who helped out…..whether preparing, setting up or chaperoning.  All of your efforts were definitely appreciated!

Wednesday’s class worked hard on letter G activities.  We focused on the hard sound of letter G….placing our hands on our throats and in front of our mouths to determine if the letter was airy, noisy or both (mostly noisy, but some air).  We talked about the shape of the letter, recognizing that upper case G looked much like a C with a line across the middle.  Lower case Gg is simply a circle and a monkey tail….easy, peasy, lemon squeezy! (rhyming words!)

To help the children remember the letter and it’s sound, we worked on color mixing with eye droppers, mixing yellow and blue water to make the color GREEN!  We also decorated both upper and lower case letter G’s with both gold and green glitter, learning how to apply the glue and glitter appropriately as to create a sparkly effect but not a puddle.  We wrote the letter and even cut out pictures that began with the G sound and glued them into a giraffe’s garden!  As a fun transition activity, the children sorted objects into containers by starting sound…G or NOT a G sound.

Finally, for snack we tried some granola.  We tasted it on it’s own and even used peanut butter that we spread on some apples and sprinkled granola on that!  I think everyone agreed that G is GGGGGGreat!