October Activities

Okay, so what if it's already January and I am just now posting our classroom activities for October?  I have been a little busy and back logged.  Therefore, I'm just going to post everything all at once. So with no further ado, here is the whirlwind that was the month of October! 

 

We started out studying about apples.

Apple Prints

Tasting different apples and charting it.

Talking about differences and similarities.

A riddle.

Then went into magic, potions, Halloween, fall, and Día de Los Muertos.

At the easel we had: invisible or magic paint,

Sugar Skulls,

And painting fall leaves with feathers.

We had a witch stop by and make magic potion for us using dry ice.  Luckily, we didn't turn into frogs, but it was a close call!  Afterwards, we experimented making our own potions from vinegar and baking soda.

We created monster faces for our Annual Halloween Trunk or Treat bags.

We played with goop in the Sensory Bin.

And Decorated our pumpkins.

We also decorated sugar skulls and talked about Día de Los Muertos, and we created an altar to celebrate the life of our fish.

We learned about skeletons by glueing them together and reading some fun fact and fictional books.

And we had a blast making monster face cookies.

We also enjoyed experimenting with colors swirling around and mixing in jars.

I know I missed a bunch of other activities and didn't get any pictures of books or circle time, but all-in-all you can see we had a very fun month!

Tea Cup Bookmarks

I got the idea to make these from Pinterest, but I couldn't find any tutorials.  Therefore, here is a simple picture tutorial of how I made mine.  These ones I made as holiday gifts for my book club.

1) Grab some felt in colors that you like.  Use the firmer felt for the backing and softer felt for the front. You can find it at any craft store, I bought mine at Michael's.  

2) Create a template that you like or if your super talented draw one free hand.  This one I found using google image search. (Hint: I am not super talented.)

3) Cut off the handle of the template so that you have two separate parts.  This just makes it easier to cut the inside handle piece. Cut out felt using templates.  Leave a little extra felt lengthwise on the handles to glue on.

4) Cut beige color for inside of cup and two tags.  Use soft felt for these.  I also embroidered "tea" or a leaf on one side of the tags.

5) Glue handle and oval to tea cup with fabric glue.

6) Thread the tea tag to the cup, leaving enough string so the tag can hang out of book.  I sewed my embroidery thread from back of cup to front and made a knot to look like tea tag was coming out of tea cup.  I also have my thread going between both tea tag and then sewed them together at the bottom. Lastly, I glued the two parts of the tea tag together. 

 

7) Voila!

I just noticed that at some point I forgot to sew the the string coming out of the tea cup.  Haha, way to follow my own tutorial!

Sweet and easy.

Apples

Fall is in th air, and although you would never know it here in Tucson, we are talking all about it in our classroom.  We started by doing a unit on apples, which we will continue throughout the week.  Here are some things and a riddle we worked on today.

In circle we noticed differences and similarities in apples and used them for math.

We painted with warm colors.

We did Apple Math in a small group activity.

And painting with apples.

We also taught the children this riddle about an apple:

Experimenting with Watercolor Drops in Water

The key to this is getting the children to only use small drops of water at a time.  As you can guess this can be very challenging for some children.  But if they are able to put the watercolor into the water just drops at a time, it can be quite mesmerizing and beautiful.  Some children didn't want to leave and spent their whole classroom free time at this table.

Composting Worms!

Blow paint

We used water colors, then gave the children pipettes to squirt color onto paper, and then blow around with a straw.  It was very popular, but hard to regulate the amount of paint put onto the paper.