Happy Halloween!

Starting the day preparing frightening treats!

Our darling play about the naughty little ghosts who don't tell the truth:

Adorable costumes:

And the most spoooooky feast ever . . .

A hauntedly fun time!  BOO!



Tierra Rejada Pumpkin Patch

Joy of honesty and candor - day 2

Even though we missed Isabel, we finished up learning about pumpkins and preparing to go on the field trip next week. We sampled some roasted pumpkin seeds, and then recalled the planting they did last week at Nicki's. After we toured the backyard and looked at the pumpkin vine we have growing, and we came inside a carved our own jack-o lantern.

Kai was the brave one who put his hand inside and touched the "punkin guts".  Everyone else decided not too. They smelled the pumpkin and put their hand inside after the guts were cleaned out. Then we decided what shapes to make the eyes and nose.  We voted to make a happy pumpkin.

Joy boy came and he brought us all red vampire fangs. With our binoculars and fangs we listened to "Looking for Dracula" again. We moved on to spiders.  We sang and read about them and talked about the spider web we saw at the Kids Adventure Garden. We had a spider snack:

With pretend eyeballs (grapes) and mud soda (rootbeer and chocolate ice cream).  They loved the pretend names for everything. And the spooky spider pizza was a hit too.

After snack we played, made our spider web art, journals and spent more time in the halloween carnival learning to wait our turn and be a good sport.

Joy of honesty and candor - Day 1

Honestly, we didn’t talk a whole lot about honesty.  We did talk about feelings, especially fear because of Halloween.  We had a great discussion about the times they have felt afraid and what made them feel better.  It was cute how serious they all were, like it was group therapy.

I told them a story about some naughty little halloween ghosts that they love, love, loved.  We practiced for our play that we will perform at the Halloween costume party.  We learned a few songs to sing for you too.  We tried to sing “Looking for Dracula”, complete with homemade binoculars, but that turned into more group therapy and another discussion about fear and pretending.

We made pumpkin muffins and boo-berry smoothies for our snack.  Everyone had a turn to put an ingredient in for our muffins and take turns stirring the batter.   The highlight here was seeing if they could scream louder than the blender that made our yummy smoothies.

After snack, we painted orange pumpkins and put expressions on them that showed feelings.  We have happy, sad, laughing and mad pumpkins to show you.  We will put them in our joy school pumpkin patch before the party.

For some real fun, the power went out while we were in the garage painting.  This led to the third round of group therapy, when the garage suddenly went black.  And yes, this is when they screamed the loudest.  Fear had lots of time today.  Hopefully another emotion can be discussed on Thursday.

Eventually, we figured out how to open the garage door without any electricity.  It was a little cold, because it was raining, but the kids had fun with a Halloween carnival I set up.  We learned about being a good sport, cheering for our friends when they had their turn, waiting our turn and most important “fair and square”.  They all like saying “fair and square”.  This was our honesty part of the day, playing the games by the rules.

At this point we ran out of time.  We didn’t get to the lesson, the letter of the week and I forgot to give someone the share bag (has everyone had a turn?)

Better time management is in the works for Thursday.  Thanks to both Grandmas who came over to help!!

~Jen

Kids Adventure Garden Field Trip