Happy Halloween!

Holidays were always my favorite times in school. I loved all the activities we’d do leading up to the holidays. We’d make skeletons out of paper plates and brass brads, or we’d do jack-o-lantern word searches. Then we’d bring candy to school and share it with our friends. Sometimes we’d have full-blown parties with cupcakes and cake walks and art projects. It was so much fun!

With Halloween being this week, I couldn’t resist pausing on our alphabet and just having some Halloween fun!

Books

We read one book and a story from another one.

The book we read was “What Was I Scared Of?” By Dr. Seuss. I just discovered this one a couple of years ago and it think it’s kinda funny. Barnes and Noble had the glow-in-the-dark version on sale when I was there last week so I grabbed it.

Then we read a story from Disney’s 5-Minute Halloween Stories. We read the one from Monster’s Inc. Lucy loves Sully and I love hearing her try to say Mike Wazowski. Nixon loves Monster’s Inc. too so it was a perfect pick for them.

Flashcards

When we reviewed flashcards today, I had them give me Halloween related words that started with each letter. Some of them were a lot harder than I’d thought they’d be. Like I (short I sound)… igloo… uh… itchy? Inchworm? Anybody got anything better?

Frankenstein for F was met with blank stares…

Jared and I came up with most of them. Though Nixon did a great job and yelled “monsters!” when we got to M. Lucy came up with “ghost” after a little coaxing.

Song

Honestly, I forgot about the song. I was too excited about the bats and haunted houses and completely spaced the song. As we were working on our tracing page though, Lucy started singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” so Jared and I joined her and we sang that one a couple of times. It’s an appropriate Halloween song, I suppose.

Tracing Page

We did another custom tracing page today. I used this site and created one that said Happy Halloween! In hindsight, I should have left the exclamation point off the end. Lucy was getting confused and kept thinking it was an upside-down i.

Look at how well they did though!

Activity

I had a plan.

We would color our haunted houses and then, while a grown up was cutting them out, the kids could throw their bat flyers around.

I wonder how long it’s going to take for me to remember that they never finish a coloring page (or a tracing page) at the same time. I mean, it’s only been, what? 11 weeks? Goodness sakes.

For the most part, the plan worked though. Nixon was in the mood to color today and did a great job. He used multiple colors and tried to color inside the lines. Lucy, on the other hand; she wasn’t feeling it, so she just grabbed a black crayon (her favorite) and scribbled all over it.

It did work to have them throwing their bat flyers around while “we” cut the haunted houses out. While I was folding the bat flyers, Jared picked up Nixon’s house and started cutting. He decided to embellish a bit and cut out the windows and the door too. They look awesome!

Then, he went another mile, and made yards for each house and lined them all up like they were all next door neighbors. Super cool! And the kids loved it!

All Done!

Today was fun!

Remember how I’d mentioned before that we were having issues with Lucy being bossy and Nixon just getting annoyed with her? Well, today, we decided not to intervene (unless it got violent, of course). I didn’t keep telling Lucy to stop being bossy and leave Nixon alone, and Jared didn’t keep telling Nixon to be nice.

Guess what happened?

They figured it out on their own.

Seriously.

It was awesome. Lucy eventually just quit being bossy and started asking for things instead of demanding them. Nixon started sharing the crayons with her. And it seemed to make play time better afterwards too.

Keeping our fingers crossed that it keeps on going that way! It was easier for all of us.

Happy Halloween! (Day 1)