Posh Princess Preschool {Pumpkins and Spiders}

We took a break from letter-of-the-week to do a mini theme week.  Olivia had a lot of fun, but I barely had enough to keep her busy.  She was done with all of her boxes in two days, and had no interest in repeating any of them.  Lucky for me, she was really interested in playing in the playroom with her dolls and didn’t bug me at all about needing something to do.















P is for Pumpkin Handwriting Page (COAH)



Letter Hunt Worksheet (COAH)



Lifecycle of a pumpkin



6 Step Sequencing Cards Jack-O-Lantern



Rectangle Discovery Box
Purplinker
Dry Erase Name Card
ABC Lacing Blocks





This blew me away:  She found the blocks and spelled her name! (all but the second i)



Primary Science Set



I asked her if she wanted to be a Mad Scientist.


“No thank you.  I not mad.”


haha…






Halloween Lacing Set
Spiders Fly Counting Cards, Plastic Spiders
Spider Math Mat, dice
Spider Rings (dollar store)






Olivia loved these little spiders.  She named one of them Garfield and kept hiding it on Saul trying to scare him.  Then she would crack herself up laughing.








Olivia really loves these math mats. She plays them very simply by rolling and counting, which is perfect for 1:1 correspondence.  They are pretty versatile though and can be used for addition, subtraction, counting money, and misc. other activities. 









I taught Olivia the 5 Little Pumpkins and Jack-O-Lantern songs.  The library was clean out of Halloween books, so we only read these ones that we own:

The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything
Skeleton Hiccups
Corduroy’s Halloween
Trick-or-Treat
The Pumpkin Patch Parable









She played some with the orange and black play-dough, and pumpkin and ghost cookie cutters.  Then she matched up “costumes” with this Who Am I game.








We took all the kids to Trunk-or-Treat last weekend and Olivia was the only one who went through all of the trunks.  She loved it and happily participated in all of the activities.






Halloween night she chose to dress up as Cinderella the married one.    She was adorable running from house to house with all of that toile behind her!







See the rest of Scary School here.

Spooky School

I’m not a huge fan of Halloween.



Just ask my kids.  They’ll tell you the same. 



“Yea…our mom doesn’t like Halloween.  It creeps her out.”





This year I caved and planned a bit of theme work for the week.  For something new and to break up our routine just enough that they aren’t getting bored.



Not that MY kids could ever get bored with me as their teacher…



The kids ended up having a lot of fun and so did I.  Here’s a look at a few of the things they did:






For some extra math, this activity was fun.  Measuring and collecting data with Bats and Ghosts.



We used the pumpkin grid and spider math mats for simple counting/addition games.



Talked about order and sequence using these Jack-O-Lantern cards.



The boys did some dictionary work with these Spooky Synonyms worksheets.



And Elaina made words and read them with these Nonsense Pumpkin Words.



We read Skeleton Hiccups and then had to put together the Skeleton Floor Puzzle.



Elaina did a couple of our home-made File Folder Games, No Bones About It and the Boo Crew.














After reading several pumpkin poems, we talked about rhyming words and then made our own spooky poems.





And then mounted and illustrated them to hang up in the school room.



The biggest part of the theme work was spent writing spooky stories.  We used these tools that include spooky story starters, a story planner, and Halloween themed lined paper.



To add interest to their stories, we learned about onomatopoeias.  This story is one of our favorites and perfectly illustrates how to use them.




Olivia did a bunch of theme work too.



She learned about the life cycle of a pumpkin…



Matched up costumes with this game…




And played mad scientist with this set.  See the rest of what she did here.