An "Orange" Week. . .

M/W/F

We began celebrating October and Fall by focussing on the color orange...Monday we took turns looking for orange items in the room.  We mixed the color orange, with red and yellow on big pieces of paper.

As you may have heard your child reciting this week, we learned the fingerplay, 5 Little Pumpkins.  As we learned this song and took turns being each of the pumpkins, we also re-enacted it with my plastic pumpkins (above) and some small (candy) pumpkins (below).

The children worked together to build the gate for the pumpkins with blocks. . .

As the week progressed, I observed that the children were really learning this song and many of them could recite the whole thing by the end of the week.  This is great language experience!

Another day, we all sat down and talked about spiders.  "Where have you seen one?"  "How big was it?"  "How many legs do they have?"   Then we sat at the table to add the legs to spiders on paper.  I gave the children a start by drawing the body of the spider.  It was good practice for them to have to aim their marker at a specific object on the paper and pay attention to the control of their marker strokes.

We then moved over to the round table to create "spider webs" by painting with a piece of rope. . . 

We read some Halloween books this week and the children were particularly interested in the monster at the end of one of the stories.  To make the monster seem less scary, we decided to create him ourselves (below).

He has pink hair and lots and lots of eyes - we called him our "Googly Eyed Monster".

We ended our week by practicing our pouring skills by having tea . . .

and we enjoyed making and eating "orange toast" - toast with cheese spread on it!

T/TH

The Tuesday/Thursday group thoroughly enjoyed working with red and yellow media to create the color orange!

We learned the fingerplay, 5 Little Pumpkins and reenacted it with my plastic pumpkins . . 

and little (candy) ones.  The children made the pumpkin's gate with various blocks.

The T/Th group got their chance to create potions!  They were given instructions to take one spoonful of cornstarch each turn and practiced their pouring skills to pour just a little bit  of one of two different colors of water and then stir to observe what happened.

After they followed instructions for awhile, they were given free rein to mix their potion however they wanted, as you can see below...

And then we cleaned up!  The children were very diligent cleaners!

We decided to add orange to our food by making "orange toast" one day (cheese spread on toast).  The children liked pushing the button down on the toaster and smelling the toast as it cooked.

We also poured ourselves some "tea" and everyone just ate their toast right up!

And, again, I had some great helpers cleaning up.  Below, Elliott helps to wash our tea cups.  The children have a great fascination with such chores, as they see us do them - its a honey-moon period, as I can vouch that my 13 year old is not longer fascinated with cleaning.

We had wonderful fun this week and everyone is adjusting so nicely!  Thank you for all your support on this, parents!