Spiders and Halloween

I would like to introduce you to the newest member of our classroom...

This might not be very exciting for the kids, but I think this new pocket chart is fantastic! Its large cards with pictures really help the students to understand the flow of our day. 

 At the preschool age, children aren't really able to grasp the concept of time in terms of days, months, or even hours. They can, however, grasp sequence. They love to know what's coming next! A daily schedule chart helps children prepare for the next event and transition more easily into other activities. We started the year with a different one, but the pictures were small and hard to decipher. This one from Lakeshore is more geared toward preschool. 

On to what's been going on the past couple weeks:

After reading the book "The Three Little Kittens" one afternoon, we made pumpkin pie!

 Both classes made pumpkins out of Model Magic. Kids really love that stuff! 

We painted them orange with green stems. 

 After learning about the life cycle of a pumpkin, the 4 year olds made a life cycle representation. 

 After pumpkins, we learned about spiders. Here, the kids are doing spider web rubbings. I used glue to "draw" a spider web on white paper. The kids used unwrapped white crayons to rub over the web on their black paper. 

 The 3s learned the poem, "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" and its silly sister poem, "The Silly Willy Spider". We also read "The Very Busy Spider" and used the felt spider that you can see on the felt board. 

The Silly Willy Spider 

Crawled up (name)'s head. 

It crawled all around, 

then made a nice soft bed. 

It wiggled down his/her shoulder, 

then jumped onto the floor.

Then the Silly Willy Spider 

Crawled to someone else for more!

 We also learned "Little Miss Muffet". The 3s LOVED acting this poem out!

Little Miss Muffett sat on a tuffet

 Eating her curds and whey

 Along came a spider who sat down beside her

 And frightened Miss Muffet away!

 During table time, the 4s worked on counting spiders...

 ...and wrapping up insects the way spiders do when they eat their prey. After wrapping the insects, the kids tried to guess which insects were inside the wrappings. 

 During small groups, we played alphabet bingo (spider style!). Each popsicle stick has a letter on it, and these are used for spider legs. The kids got to add a leg to their spider if I called a letter in their pile. 

 We also learned why spiders don't stick to their webs. Insects stick to spider webs because the webs are sticky, but spiders have oil on their legs so they can walk around on the web. This is contact paper with the sticky side up. We pretended our hands were bugs and walked our fingers across the sticky paper. Then we dipped our fingers into oil and tried it again. Oily fingers don't stick! 

The 4 year olds also learned the parts of a spider. I created this little activity for us to do as a group:

(Click on the picture to download a copy.)

Spider week was so much fun! 

 These girls are taking a little Ladel break! 

Here are some pictures from our Halloween parties: