Tissue Ghosts

I meant to post these photos last week, but I had a lazy weekend!

 On Friday we made these tissue ghosts with a cotton ball, string, and a tissue. They look great hanging in front of our window.

 I love how some of the ghosts have happy smiles, they are friendly ghosts, ready to welcome you to school.

Happy Halloween!

 

 We had a blast dressing up for our Halloween Discovery session. (The teacher in the cow onesie is not me, but one of the other amazing teachers in J-Block.)

I always try to plan activities that encourage the children to practise a variety of skills and attitudes we use at school. Cutting, gluing, folding, drawing, writing, copying, sharing, turn-taking, persevering, taking risks, and helping others are some of what I observed during today's Discovery session. Discovery allows the children to discover about school, about our topic for the week, and what they themselves are able achieve.

Have a look at some of the activities we explored today:

 

 We blew up balloons and drew jack-o-lantern faces on them. I bought 90 orange balloons to ensure we had enough!

 We made paper-towel mummies, spider thaumatropes, folding bat cards, skull masks, icky insect wristbands, and tissue ghosts.

One of my favourite activities was using a permanent marker to draw jack-o-lantern faces on oranges. Which we got to eat for lunch, yummy.

We played Toca Boca Monster Kitchen on the ipads. This is a free app where you have to choose food for the monsters, cook it, and then feed it to them. Sometimes they don't like it and will spit it out all over the screen.  (That's the best part!)

Watch Me Spin

With Halloween around the corner we created these paper plate spiders to decorate our classroom. They have folded paper legs, all that folding was good fine motor practise and helps strengthen the children's fingers. And finger strength is just what we need for all of the amazing writing we have been doing lately.

We have also been reading this spider poem.

Our Huge Hanging Spiders

You had better look out when you come into Room 4! 

 Our huge hanging black spiders are out to get you with their pointy fangs and black dangling spider legs.

These paper plate spiders took us a couple of weeks to make. The black paint needed to be completely dry before we could staple on our black paper legs. We also wrote facts about spiders that I glued underneath their tummies, that way everyone who visits us can enjoy reading what we know about spiders too.

"Spiders have patterns for camouflage."

 

"Spiders can be on the floor and climb. They climb and stay on the wall. Spiders have 8 legs with four eyes or 8. Spiders make webs. Big spiders eat mice. Spiders go fast."

"Spiders eat flies and bees. And the spider makes a spider web and they live in webs and houses. Lots live in the ground."

"Spiders catch flies with their web. They spin their web at night."

"Spiders crawl fast. They live on their web."

I used these spiders from Sparklebox to write some interesting spider words on for us to read with our spider facts.

All that tricky accordion folding for the legs of our spiders was a great way to strengthen our fingers to get them ready for writing. 

 

These spiders make a great Halloween art and craft activity as well. 

Happy Halloween

Ohhh... Caution - beware all who dare to enter J-Block. 

 Check out our Halloween Discovery session.

We made plastic bag ghosts (cut the handles off a plastic bag, stuff it with newsprint, and tie the handles to make arms, and draw on a ghost face).

 Cut out skull masks...

...then we made mini-mummies with paper towels...

.... and folding bat cards to give to someone we are 'batty' about.

We blew up jack-o-lantern balloons....

.... made haunted houses.... 

.... then snacked on monster biscuits ....

....and jack-o-lantern oranges....

 

Yum - fractions!