Candy Corn pumpkins

I got this idea off of Pinterest my only suggestion is to either use hot glue or possibly tacky glue, the regular glue sort of just ate away at the sugar and we have been dodging candy falling off the walls since I hung them up...they sure are cute though!

Dinosaur murals

For the summer I let the munchkins come up with activities they want to do before they head off to kindergarten. We cut up an old box to paint the mountains and the sky. 

Each child got half of a regular piece if white paper and used gel pens to draw their dinosaurs (we also have lots of Dino toys for the to look at for inspiration). I laminated the drawings an let the children put them wherever they wanted on the mountain. 

Hello Kitty Pumpkin

One of the munchkins brought in two white pumpkins to decorate our class with, so naturally I did this to them :D

Spooky Cat Hand Prints!

A cute addition to our hand print books, just paint the kids hand black and paint on a tail. After it dries use white paint to draw claws, ears, and a face!

Halloween Spiders!

Simple, easy, and quick! I painted dixie cups black and had the children put on sticky eyes. I cute eight strips of black construction paper and the kids folded them up to make the spider legs. I taped the legs onto the inside of the cup and viola! These little guys are spread around the shelves in the classroom.

An Apple a Day...

Decorating for the beginning of the school year, we made these cute little apple hand prints. Using red to paint their palms, and green to paint a finger for the stem :) They'll be a perfect first hand print to put in our hand print books!

Now we know our ABC'S!

We finally finished our letters this week! I was hoping to get them all done by September and we finally did! A few years ago we went to a training for Handwriting Without Tears and have been using it ever since. It really is such an amazing program, and have never seen anything work so fast and so effectively with the children.

They say not to work on pushing letters to hard before age 4, so I try to keep it all really light, fun, and easy going the first year. We started in about January after giving the munchkins a few months to settle in. For each letter we start by introducing it at circle time. I draw it first on the easel and we discuss how to write it using HWT terms (big line, little line, big curve, little curve). Then each child takes a turn writing it.

Then we go to tables and do the letter worksheet from the Handwriting Without Tears My First School Book (used to be Get Set For School). I just make copies of the pages the first year and then this year they will be doing their own workbook. After they finish their workbook they get a date stamp and a Hello Kitty stamp (obv) :)

Usually within the next day or so we make a letter collage. I cut out the lines or curves and the children use glue sticks to glue them onto construction paper. I keep them all connected and they just got to take them home this week.

To celebrate finishing our letters I bought the kids cheez-it letters, and magnetic letters & numbers for the classroom :)