Spooktacular Halloween!

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween from the Bright-Eyed Bears!!!!

A wonderful time was had by all on Friday.  As dinosaurs and princesses, pirates and superheroes, characters and more lined up to parade their costumes, there wasn't a frown in the bunch!  Everyone was in the "treat" sort of mood, and left the "tricks" to the goblins and ghosts!  Mrs. Cummings and I enjoyed seeing all of the bright and shiny costumes. The air was electric, and luckily the weather turned around!  It was a festive festival indeed!  Thanks for joining us and making our day such a fun and memorable Autumn event! 

Happy Halloween!

The costumes were SPOOKTACULAR! 

The Grins were HAUNTINGLY HAPPY! 

Have a safe and happy Halloween night! 

We Love Halloween!!!

The Bright-Eyed Bears have really been enjoying this song and poem in class. The children have the book and mini pumpkins to act it out along with the video.

Halloween Parade and Fall Festival!

What fun! What fun, under the sun! 

A Halloween parade and Festival fun by the ton!  

It's coming! It's coming!  We're counting down! 

To see smiling goblins, witches and ghosts around Shorecrest town. 

Friday is almost here.  The children have indeed been counting down the days to the Halloween Parade and Fall Festival.  Please be sure to read the letter in your child's bag about the happenings for the big day.

He/She may wear their costume to school and bring play clothes to change into.  Please label their costumes to make sure they all go home with the correct child. Thanks for your help! :)  Just a reminder that all children should be picked up by 10am in our GREEN DOOR classroom.  Hope to see you at the Fall Festival! 

                       Take a look at some of our hauntingly good times from this week and last!

After a "Leaf Walk" around campus we made a cool Fall collage!

Shadow Dancing with homemade Halloween puppets.

Tracing pumpkins, cutting them out, and adding pattern block faces is fun!

We'll dictate a story about our Jack-o-lanterns too!

We made spiders and wrote their names too!!

We love taking turns to add our own flare to the "Five Little Pumpkins" poem. 

We measured the ingredients and made orange play dough to roll Magic C!

.....And so much more!

Happy Wednesday!

Mrs. Carson

PE News!

 A note from the PE coaches.

The PE coaches asked me to share this blog post from Coach Pope's blog with you. They ask for your help with keeping the new Athletic Facility it top shape by having your child wear sneakers (no other style shoes) on PE days which are Monday and Friday for our class.
Thanks! Here it is:

The New AC!
What an exciting time to be a Shorecrest student (and coach too!) with the opening of our brand new Athletic Center. This space allows us the opportunity to develop skills in an environment that is safe, secure, and beautiful.

This week we will be having a "Gym Fun Week" to celebrate this opening. Games like Junk in the Trunk, The Magic Disk, Treasure Island, and Smash the Pumpkin will be used to reinforce teamwork and cooperation. Overhand throwing, kicking, and locomotor skills will also be a major focus this week.

Given our amazing new facility, we ask that all students come to school in athletic shoes with non-marking soles on the days that they have PE. This way we will be able to keep the floors in perfect condition for many years to come! 

More Apples and Lot's o' Fall Activities!

5 Red Apples

The children enjoyed this fun youtube video as part of our Centers last week.  Not only did they love singing along with the video, but they also painted, cut and pasted their own props to make the poem come alive!

Songs, poetry, and props not only make learning easier for some, but more meaningful and more fun for all.  This week the children will learn the poem "Five Little Pumpkins", use actual pumpkins as props, and be able to follow along with a book that depicts the words and pictures as well.

First Fruits Hydroponic Farm

We all were very excited to visit First Fruits Hydroponic Farm last week.  The children have been learning about different styles of gardening and how fruits and vegetables grow.  They have even practiced with dramatic play gardening in the Exploratorium, and tending to our real garden outside on the playground. It was really cool to see how, and experience how first hand to grow plants the hydroponic way.  The stacking planters filled with special planting medium, watered three times daily, and given nutrients once a day produce many more plants, with less weeding too!  The children had so much fun helping the farmer and his son to build the "stacks", add the planting medium, then actually plant strawberry plants for growing in the farm.

In "The Jungle" as they call it.  Tomato jungle!

Go ahead and visit with your family.  Maybe the children can pick the fruits of their labor!  Strawberries in January!

Fall Exploring Fun!

 Halloween fingerprint art.  Very popular with the children!

Friday was Exploring Day!  The children had a frightfully great time exploring all sorts of spooktacular Halloween activities!

The tactile room with goulish things to touch and play with like "mummy eyes", and "werewolf fingernails", sparkly pumpkin shaving cream, and "noodley" pumpkin vines with bats and spiders inside, was terrifyingly terrific. 

The children loved playing BOO BINGO! The Mr. Pumpkin Head...Halloween for Mr. Potato Head, was heartily received!

And there was sooooo much more! :)

Go Chargers!!

Everyone was in full spirit for the opening of our new athletic center!  The children were "charged" about seeing the amazing facility and cheered their little hearts out with the crowd!

It was a great week in Junior Kindergarten!  The fun goes on!  It will be a funtastic fall week this week.  Join us for the Fall Festival on Friday!  The Happy Halloween Parade will begin at 8:30am with some frightfully fun costumes!  See you then!

Happy Week!

Mrs. Carson

Apple-icious Apple Day and Pumpkinny Pumpkins!

Apple Day!

What an APPLE-ICIOUS Apple Day we had on Monday!  The children participated in lots of exciting activities such as sorting, counting, and graphing apples by kinds, apple printing for hats, slicing and dicing (with plastic knives of course) apples and adding sugar and cinnamon to make warm, sweet applesauce, tasting different types of apples, and much more!

Mmmm!  I like the golden delicious apple the best!  It's juicy!

Apple printed hats are cool!

Fall not only celebrates apple harvesting, but pumpkin harvesting too!  The children have been learning all about PUMPKINS!  They have read stories about the life cycle of pumpkins, the different sizes and shapes of them, and how they are harvested.  We love pumpkins in Jr. Kindergarten.  As the children practice fine motor skills with using scissors, properly applying glue, tearing, painting, and tracing, the end results brought a big, beautiful pumpkin patch of paper to admire in our classroom.

using scissors to cut on a spiral, creating pumpkin vines

tearing strips of newspaper to stuff various-sized bags 

painting the pumpkin


October Song

Pick, pick, pick a fat pumpkin!
Pick, pick, pick a fat pumpkin!
Pick, pick, pick a fat pumpkin!
October brings the harvest.

Tomatoes, corn, and apples too.
We'll have a feast when we are through.
Now I'm hungry-how about you?
October brings the harvest!

It's so much fun adding literacy to art!  The October song is one of our FAVORITES!!!

Have a happy day!

Mrs. Carson

Exciting Upcoming Plans!

Monday is APPLE DAY!  Yummy apples for graphing, making prints with, tasting, and cooking!  Please send an apple of any kind with your Bright-Eyed Bear on Monday! :)

Thursday is our field trip to First Fruits Hydroponic Farm!  I have my two volunteer chaperones.  Thank you!  The children will really enjoy seeing the fruits of the farmer's labor, just like they see the fruits of theirs in our garden on the playground.  Tilling soil, planting, watering, weeding, and watching, is hard work.....But it sure is fun!  I think it will be exciting for the children to experience a new way of gardening and making familiar things grow in a special sort of way.  The Hydroponic Farmers grow in the air, rather than along the ground.  They have a special mixture which is made and put into containers which stack. The plants grow all around the container.  This allows for many more fruits of the labor! I'll take lots of pictures to share with you next week.  For an even closer look, however, visit the farm.  This is a fabulous family trip to take...next Sunday. I bet your child will even be able to show you around! :)

Friday is ATHLETIC CENTER DEDICATION DAY!  The children made something special to add to a time capsule that will go into this beautiful new building on campus.  What a lucky time it is to be a Charger Athlete!  All children will be able to learn, practice, and grow in a state of the art facility! We are all so excited to go inside!

*We have many happy learning activities planned for this week as always!  Stay tuned for pictures and stories and fun!

Happy Sunday!
Mrs. Carson

Falling for Fall!

Fall!

It's that Fall time of year!  Autumn!  The children can tell you exactly why so many people call the season of Autumn "Fall"......It's because the leaves fall from the trees!  We have had so much fantastic Fall fun, so far.  The Bright-Eyed Bears have been discovering colorful leaves on our playground during recess, collecting them, and looking at them in our Science Center.  Yesterday, they enjoyed using fall colors with crayons to make leaf rubbings to go into their Science Journals.  They also learned a new poem about the leaves falling from the trees and CRUNCHING beneath our feet.  We were all gracefully twirling, zigzagging, and spinning as fast as we could, in dramatic play pretending we were falling leaves.

Two friends "reading" our CRUNCH poem and acting it out!

"Crunch!"
Five fall leaves hanging from a tree.
One will fall last. Who will it be?
Red fell first, spinning to the ground.
Yellow fell fast, zigzagging down.
Green fell next with a graceful flight.
Orange twirled around with all its might.
Last, the brown leaf joined the bunch.
I stomped that leaf to hear it crunch!

Pattern-making has been a popular learning activity in our classroom. The children are very good at adding to existing and creating their own patterns.  We change them on the calendar to follow the seasons, have activities in Centers that allow the children to use manipulatives of all shapes, colors and sizes to create patterns, and notice them in our everyday surroundings.

Bright-Eyed Bears enjoying using rubber objects in the shapes of bats, squirrels, pumpkins and more for pattern-making!

It's fabulously Fall-ish fun!

SPCA VISIT

Sharon Hauser from the SPCA came to visit today as an exciting end to our Pets study.  The children were thrilled to welcome her and her SPCA rescued dog, Rusty.  They were very attentive and hung on every word Mrs. Hauser said during her story of "Sam the Sad Puppy".  In the end, Sam got a home with a family who loved him.  He had a bed, good food, and treatment from the Vet.  His frown magically turned upside down!  The children cheered!  To top off the excitement, everyone got to pat Rusty!  It was GRRRRREAT!

We Love RUSTY The Dog!

APPLES

Monday is Apple day!  Don't forget to send in a scrumptious apple with your child!!! :)

We will graph them (so many different colors and sizes are welcome), hear a story about them, make prints with them, slice them and dice them for tasting, and make apple sauce for a delicious lunch dessert!  Yum!

Field Trip Next Week!

Our field trip to First Fruits Hydroponic Farm is on Thursday the 20th.  I would love for 1 or 2 volunteers to accompany us.  It will be "first come, first serve".  

Happy Long Weekend!

Mrs. Carson