Costume Parade

My kids both wanted to be soldiers for halloween.

You might question where they came up with that idea from.

Well, they just want to be like their Daddy ;)

I made my girl's dress out of an old military blouse. 

A friend taught me how to sew this dress.  She is an awesome seamstress!  

We used this pattern {here}

I'm hopin' I'll also get to try this pattern too, some day!

The pockets on her dress come from the original pockets of the blouse and the belt was made from the wrist cuffs of the shirt.

There was enough material to make my son a "tool belt" (or candy belt) from the other pockets of the shirt.

My sister, Becka, made a homemade halloween costume too (a little black cat, I believe ;)).  I'm hoping she'll post it today, as well.

This post is linked up to the Halloween Costume Parade Party at SITS!

Check it out:

Preschool Activity: Halloween Night Creature's Festival

I had three special guests come to the house today.  

A cat,

a bat,

and an owl!

And a little sister, too...

We had Night Creature snacks

We talked about Night Creature facts

and played Night Creature games... 

like Mouse, mouse owl 

(a variation of duck, duck goose),

Pin the tail on the cat,

and outside bat chase...

(I had this cape I got off clearance last year.  

I cut it up to make little toddler bat wings ;))

We read a lot of books today.

I read excerpts about owls, bats and other night animals from this book:

Creatures of the Night

Peek a Who

In the Tall Tall Grass

Duck and Goose Find a Pumpkin

Lesson Targets

Fine Motor Skills:  Mixing and shaping mouse cookies

Outdoor/gross motor skills:  Running and playing "bats".  Mouse, mouse, owl game.

New Concepts:  Explanation of "night creatures" and what they do

Art:  Preparing masks

Social:  Cooperating in turn-taking games

Science:  Mixing mouse cookies

Reading:  Learning about Rs.  R was our special letter of the day so I had the kids help me find the missing Rs in our menu and fact finding sheet!

If you'd like to do something like this yourself, you're welcome to use the pdf:

Night Creature Festival

print note: This fun preschool party can be helpful for kids learning about night creatures. The menu and fact sheet is missing a special letter. Can your preschooler fill it in? The face masks should be printed on black cardstock. Add a popsicle stick with tape so the kids can hold up their masks!

This post is linked up to the site with style!!!
For my SITS girls!

Ghosts of Halloween Pasts

Becka and I are participating in this year's SITS Halloween Celebration at SITS so today I am going to take a break from our Preschool Activity week and highlight some of our Halloween treats from a past year.

Remember this pumpkin?

{click here}

I think Becka did a wonderful job painting her pumpkin, giving it a little different face than the traditional jack-o-lantern.

And here is a video of the stunt my husband and I played on trick-or-treaters last year.  We painted his whole head grey and white.  It helped that his hair was shaved.  

This is a video of me approaching him (16 sec long)

And here is a video of John tricking a few neighbors (12 sec):

We tricked every single trick-or-treater!!!  Some kids approached very apprehensively while others had no clue my husband's head was alive.  We even got our 16 yr old babysitting neighbor startled.  She had a whole conversation with me before she realized the head on the table was alive.  It was a lot of fun. 

And here are a few fall decorations and links from past posts that highlight the fall season!

click here

{click here}

Thanks for stopping by everyone!

Happy Halloween!!!

Book Recommendations!

Hi everyone! My friend Vanessa from Silly Eagle Books has a few great recommendations for us! These books help children explore colors and shapes. They could go along with either the preschool snake or caterpillar lesson!

The Black Book of Colors

(this is a really interesting book-- it shares color as described by a blind person)

Mouse Paint

(a huge favorite)

White is for Blueberry

(A different take on the usual color book)

Preschool Activity: Bugs and Critters

I love to paint with the kids.

For this project we used apples for paint brushes.

I cut out a stack of round circle papers and let the kids use cut up apples as stamps for their art.

The caterpillars turned out pretty cute, don't you think?

For this week, my friend also did this caterpillar art project with the kids:

She and the kids had a discussion about

"Oval" starts with "O"

They made a caterpillar out of a series of Ovals!

Pretty clever, don't you think?

And, of course, we shared The Very Hungary Caterpillar with the kids.

This book covers the concept of change an animal will go through in maturity.

The book also takes the kids through a series of counting exercises.

(counting fruits, counting foods)

And, don't worry, we talked about spiders too ;)

It is Halloween, right?

The kids each gathered four pipe cleaners and twisted them in the middle to make an eight legged creatures which we hung up outside:

spooky, eh?

Tomorrow we have a halloween party planned for our little preschoolers!

I'm pretty stoked ;)

Lesson Targets:

Fine Motor skills: Painting and twisting pipe cleaner

Gross Motor skills: Hanging up web and "spiders" outside

Conceptual: Colors

Science: Discussion of change and growth in a butterfly

Math: Counting spider legs

Reading: The Very Hungry Caterpillar


I'd like to add this post to a SITS link-up featuring Halloween crafts like our spiders!

Preschool Activity: Snakes, Shapes and Snacks

Have you ever put your meals in a muffin tin?

Just switching up your presentation of a meal can really encourage your preschoolers to eat!

This website {click here} has tons of ideas to make snacks and meals for muffin tins.

Alright, today's Preschool Activity has to do with shapes and colors.

I learned this activity from my wonderful preschool-teaching mentor.

She cut a spiral into a paper plate like this:

photo credit

I drew a smiley face in the center of the plate to represent a snake's face.

When you hold on to the tip of the plate, the plate hangs down in a spiral:

This day I was teaching the kids about shapes and colors. So I drew a few shapes on the snakes "body" and then asked the kids to paint them different colors.

ie "paint the triangle blue, the square purple, the crescent orange, etc"

We had a lot of fun with this activity.

Surprisingly, these snakes are hard to photograph.

It's difficult to capture the depth and dimension they give to the room as they hang in a spiral. They really add to the decorations, I believe ;)

Here was the book I shared with the kids on that day:

{click here}

I love that this book helps children find shapes in every-day activities.

A few days later my son was eating a granola bar and he said, "Look Mom! My granola bar is in the shape of a rectangle!"

Pre-school activity: Farm Animals with Goat Printable

Farm Animals: A classic Preschool lesson topic!

For this lesson we read

Fluffy Chick Leap Frog Lift-a-Flap (love that book!)

At circle time, I pulled out a big bucket of toy animals and we organized them into two piles:

Farm animals (cows, sheep, goats) and not farm animals (jungle frogs, parrots, elephants, etc)

To cover art and math, we assembled this goat project:

To do this goat project yourself, you can use

the following printables (click on the images to enlarge and print)

(recognize this goat face from anywhere?)

-I originally made the body and legs from scratch:

We cut out the goat's heads and colored them.

To cover a math activity, I threw all the legs into a big pile and asked the kids to pull out one of each number. Then I had the kids put the legs in numerical order and paste them to their goats!

We also practiced writing our names on the goat bodies.

After our goat activity, I took the kids on an imaginary tour around a farm outside. I had strategically placed a few fresh oranges in the backyard and as we pet the pretend goats and sheep, we also "picked" fresh oranges and brought them back inside for a snack ;)

Lesson Targets

Art: Coloring and Gluing

Math: Shapes and Numbering

Organizational Skills: Categorizing farm animals

Fine Motor skills: Cutting and gluing

Outdoor/Gross-motor skills: Walking around outside, visiting an imaginary farm.

Language Development: Reading Fluffy Chick and practicing writing our names

Science: Learning how to make fresh orange juice by pressing oranges on a juicer

Preschool Activity: Fall Leaves

A few other friends and I take turns teaching preschool to our 3 yr olds.

I pushed our dining table over into the family room and decided our dining area would be the perfect place to hold "class".

(Since my husband is deployed, I usually end up eating dinner with the kids at the small table, anyway. ;))

Right out of college I taught at HeadStart for a year.  I was paired with another teacher who was the most amazing woman ever!  She cherished the children we worked with and really knew how to teach and foster their development.  She had been teaching preschool for many years and she knew a craft to go with every lesson theme possible!

She also knew how to stay calm when a child was intentionally mean or disobedient.  She definitely had a special magic in her!

Anyway, I learned so much about teaching children from her.

She taught me how to carry a lesson theme through multiple dimensions (like math, science, reading, exercise, art, etc).

Recently, I've really enjoyed teaching preschool to my son and his friends.  This week I'd like to highlight some of our lesson plans.

Lesson 1:  Learning about Fall

Have you ever made "stain glass" art out of tissue paper?

Well, we incorporated that idea in order to make multi-colored leaves.

We also painted, glued on pipe cleaner and got creative with a few other techniques for our leaves.

Then we went outdoors for a walk to pick up real life, dried and colored leaves.

Then we hung them all on our "tree" :)

During circle time we talked about seasons and the changes we see in the world around us as the weather grows cold.  

A good book to go along with this preschool lesson is 

I Love Fall

Written by Alison Inches

Illustrated by Hiroe Nakata

This book explores multiple aspects of fall through the touch and feel of a woolly scarf, fallen leaves, a smooth wicker basket, and more.

Lesson Targets

Outdoor/gross-motor Activity:  Finding and collecting leaves

Fine-motor activity:  Gluing small pieces of tissue paper.  Also, pinching the clothes pins to hang leaves up on the "tree"

Art and color:  Assembling the leaves

Math:  Counting the leaves on the tree

Science:  Circle time discussion- Seeing the changes in the weather around us.

Reading:  I Love Fall by Alison Inches