Halloween Hoot!

We had an absolute HOOT last week at Little Owl Academy, celebrating Halloween. 

I started off the week by introducing our fun witches hat. When I saw this hat at Walmart a few weeks again I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it. It became our "catch the good witch," hat. Anytime I would catch someone doing something good, kind, nice, or working hard they would get to wear the hat. They would wear it for about 10 minutes before I switched "Good Witches." They loved wearing the hat and it made it especially festive around school!

On Monday, along with introducing the number 8 and the letter H, we made some spooky monsters. I was SO excited to make these monsters, and then ended up feeling a little disappointed. I didn't snap any pictures of them (They were too much work to take a break!) They were a fun pack from Hobby Lobby, but unfortunately it was not as preschool friendly as I had hoped. The stickers didn't want to stick and they didn't want to be glued, so we had a good laugh as we watched our monsters "change" as the pieces would slide around.

On Wednesday, along with learning the letter J, we spent the majority of our time decorating pumpkins. My good friend Beth taught kindergarten at my school I taught at 4 years ago. Beth is an amazing teacher, for many reasons, but one reason is she goes all out for her students. I remember walking into her classroom one morning and seeing 25+ pumpkins sitting on the tables and she said they were decorating pumpkins for Halloween. Then I realized she taught two sessions a day...thats over 50 pumpkins! So I just knew we had to decorate pumpkins this year. If she could do 50 in one day, I could do 8.

I spent a lot of time preparing for this project and I learned A LOT. 

Here are some key things I learned:

-Your students will think decorating pumpkins is the coolest activity they have done all year. Double the amount of time you think it will take for them to complete. They LOVED it.

-Come up with a variety of ways to decorate the pumpkins. I used glitter glue, paint, and foam art pieces.

-Find fast drying paint (this was one thing I didn't have) I thought if we started at the beginning of our time, they would for sure be dry by the end. But, paint on pumpkins does not dry very fast. We had to walk out to the cars carrying our pumpkins as far away from us as we could because they were still wet!

-Next year I will either be doing painting pumpkins, or sticker and pumpkins, combining both got a little difficult.

-Find the perfect pumpkin! I look at the mini pumpkins and they were just way too small. These perfect pumpkin pie pumpkins were found at Walmart for $2.50 each. They were the perfect size!

On Friday we celebrated Halloween by coloring pictures, singing songs, playing games, and having a mini party. 

I wanted to make sure to do something fun each day, because many of my students come only 1 or 2 days a week. I am looking forward to my Halloween party next year, because I will have students who attend all 3 days, so we will be doing a dress up party!