Halloween

Our theme for this week was Halloween and Pumpkins.  We started the week with a trip to the Pumpkin Patch.  Thankfully, after a really bad thunderstorm Saturday, Sunday ended up being the perfect Fall day - sunny and beautiful.   The Farm had all kinds of activities but we settled on just the bouncy house before heading out on the hay ride. 

Searching for the perfect pumpkin.

Success at last.

That night was our town's Trunk or Treat - an activity where people decorate their cars, park them together in a public lot and kids can "Trick or Treat" from car to car.  This is the first year Vicki is really aware of what is going on.  She had a great time and said "Thank you" to everybody.

Georgie was a bat.

Vicki was a Princess.  She wore one of her dress-up outfits.  This is probably the last year we can get away with picking her costume for her.

During the week, we painted some of our pumpkins....

and cut one open so we could see what's inside.  Georgie did not want to have anything to do with the "icky stuff" but Vicki was right in there with her own spoon scooping out seeds.

After letting the seeds dry out overnight we used some of them to make pictures showing what the inside of a pumpkin looks like.  We glued a yellow pumpkin shape to an orange pumpkin shape, then added strips of orange paper for the "icky stuff" and glued on seeds.

We read a few stories about Pumpkins and watched "The Magic School Bus Goes Batty" to finish up our Halloween theme for the week.   

Georgie just recently started getting very interested in counting to 100.  He can do most of it with very little prompting but to help reinforce it we're playing some games using the 100 chart.  His favorite so far is to use a die and, starting at one, move a marker the number of spaces rolled until he reaches 100.   He's doing very well at identifying the numbers he lands on. 

For reading, he pretty much knows all the letter sounds so we're working more on sounding out words.  I laminated a bunch of lotto sheets - a 3 x 3 grid with a word in each space - and he enjoys crossing out each word as he reads it or finding them as I read them (throwing in a few that aren't there but are close to see if he's really paying attention - ex.  "find got" when only "get" is actually there).  I just discovered that he recognizes the 9 most common color words (red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple, pink, brown, black).  We're also working on reading "Hop on Pop" and "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish".  Right now, he can get through almost half of each one with a little prompting.

We finished up the week celebrating Grandpa Charlie's wedding.   Since it was on Halloween (but I had already taken apart Georgie's bat costume) the kids dressed up as an Eagles football player and an Eagles cheerleader (clothes they just happened to have).

Go Eagles!!!