Candy Highs !

I took this picture to show you the new unbreakable mirrors I got in for the play areas but as I posted it.. I thought it was a good representation of our day. Can you say sugar high the day after Halloween ?

And then... a few pictures from party day!

Whew. We made it. Tomorrow will be better , right ?

Happy Halloween

I just arrived at our bed and breakfast in Mountain View , Arkansas for the weekend. We are here for a festival that we come to every year called the " bean festival." It is mainly a music festival with tons of blue grass and country music. Randy loves it... thus I tag along.

I think the kids had fun with Jodie and Devin today. Thanks Rachel and Tricia for hanging out with them for a bit.

Here is today's Friday Flick for you! Enjoy !

Today is MY Friday

Randy and I are going out of town for the weekend, so today is our Friday. Jodie and Devin will be in charge tomorrow. I know they are looking forward to all the Halloween Festivities.

I made a few orders last week and had some new things arrive today. Below is our new marker holder. I have went through hundreds of markers since the beginning of the year from caps left off, so we are going to try this wooden holder. The cap stays in the wooden piece and the kids pull the marker out. I am hoping this solves our missing lid problem. To demonstrate how it works today we traced a pumpkin. :)

We also made nutter butter ghost.

First you smooth on the marshmellow creme.

Then you use gel to paint on the eyes and the mouth.
'

Emeri loved this activity !

It was a good day!

Estimation ....we just dont get it yet

The halloween fun has already begun...

Sharpening fine motor and math skills can be fun !

Gross motor ( large muscles) - tossing a pumpkin in the can.

Geneviette and Rosanna built a pet shop. Rosanna is the pet ! :)

Emeri holding our pumpkin to try and guess how much it weighed. Estimation is an important skill but one that usually just comes with experience, not teaching. Today we weighed a few of the kids and talked about the numbers. Then we compared the pumpkin by holding it and each took guesses of how much it weighed. I got numbers from 5 to 105. The correct weight was 12.4 lbs.

With all the excitement about building going on we are lucky to have someone here painting our house . He is doing an excellent job. The kids were able to sit and watch him work for a while today.








Today .. as always was a good day.

The Little Old Lady

One of the kids favorite books is called " The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything." It has lots of predictive text in it . Today we decided to add some props and actions to the story.

The pants go wiggle wiggle...

The shirt goes shake , shake...

The two white gloves go clap, clap

Two shoes go clomp , clomp...

The hat goes nod , nod...

And in the end ( not sure why there is no picture ) the very big, very orange pumpkin head goes BOO!

We made a picture of a house today with shapes. Drawing this is a nice little shapes review. I am not the best artist. When I did this activity with the second group and drew my circle for the tree and said.. " what shape is this ?" William busted me out and said " OVAL!" He was right...

One of our matching games today.

Cohen brought a HUGE praying mantis to school today.

Using letter tiles to make words.

Matching pumpkin faces

The book we read. This is a great book. Very simple but tells the story of how a house is built.

We did a tracing activity today so I would see first hand which children are still struggling with the right way to hold a marker for writing. The fist grip you see below is typical for a three year old. I did reinforce for the three year olds how to hold the marker and helped them but it is still difficult for many.

Below you can see we talked about rulers . We used them to measure and then we used them to draw a straight line .

Below you can see the perfect grip for writing.

We talked about non standard measure. Non standard measure is when we just something other than a ruler or tape to measure. How many times have you walked off the room to see how big it is ? That is non standard measure. We talked about which twer of blocks was taller and which was shorter. We talked about the terms most and least.