The month of October has been filled with apples, pumpkins and the upcoming holiday of Halloween. We have been counting daily the days until Halloween on our classroom calendar since the beginning of the month. This has been great practice with rote counting!

Your children are very enthusiastic and curious about almost anything that we put out in our classroom during the school morning. They are so creative with how they use these manipulatives! Here are a few pictures…

The rug is always an area where the children love to play. All this past week, we had pirate ships out because it was so popular with both the boys and the girls.

The Big Room continues to be a favorite place. It is interesting to see how the play of the children has advanced here now that they are older. For instance, what they make with the blocks is so much more detailed and planned out than when they were younger.

We are still using the patio as much as possible with this unexpected, warmer weather. We will use it while we can!

We taste tested 4 different types of apples. They were McIntosh, Granny Smith, Red Delicious and Golden Delicious. We charted our favorites and talked about why it was our favorite.

We read and sang Ten Apples Up On Top and then watched the video of the story. We compared the book with the video to see if there were any changes made.

For cooking, we made both Apple crisp and pumpkin cookies.

We covered the tables with all different types of materials and this was what your children did with everything …very impressive!

We painted pumpkins using a fork. We painted and decorated real pumpkins to bring home. We also looked at and discussed the life cycle of a pumpkin. Next week, we will weigh, carve and count the seeds with our classroom pumpkin.

Lately, we have been discussing the different types of leaves. On Thursday, we went outside and did a scavenger hunt, clipboard and all!

I hope that you are all enjoying this beautiful weather with your families!

Take care,

Jan and Maggie