Preschool Party Halloween Style

Do you want to know how we had the "BEST Halloween party EVER???"  Of course you do!  Harmony's House wants to share our spook-tacular ideas so you can have the most fun too!

Large boxes painted into haunted houses are super fun, especially when orange and black bandannas hang down from the roof!

Art should be done on an outstanding scale, with witches brooms, of course.

Don't let that spider out!  He's enormous!  Just throw your rings at him!  He might catch one or two!

Water beads, eyeballs, creepy critters, colanders, and ladles made the brew station a sensory sensation.  We made witch brew in different ways over and over again!

Believe it or not, "Screwing a Pumpkin" was a favorite activity that children returned to again and again.  Getting the screws in the pumpkin was a bit tricky, so Ms. Harmony prepped this activity by screwing all the screws in.  The children explored ways to turn the screw driver to make the screws go up or down.  Some children even got the screws all the way out!

Eat a book, or read one... whichever suits the little monster.  ;)

These blocks were filled with real bones from an opossum!  It was neat to combine them with mirror blocks, and talk with the children about what parts of the body each set of bones came from.

Play in the Vampire Lair, or the Mummy House, or the Witchy Woods!

And don't forget to trick or treat!

We appreciate all of the parental involvement in pulling this off!  We couldn't have done it without you!

 That's a wrap on how we party hard in the preschool!  <3

SPOOKY Science and Art!

Halloween season is such a fun time to sneak in amazing science opportunities.  This week we did some simple science as we pretended to be witches making potions!  Instead of dark cauldrons, I provided the children with clear jugs or bowls because I wanted them to see the chemical reactions and material densities easily.

The children were challenged to pick up fake creepy crawlies with tweezers.  We noticed that these buggers sank right to the bottom even if we stirred them up.  We described them as being heavier than the water.

We used spoons to try to pick up the bouncy ball eyeballs and discovered these would float even after being in the water for a long time and being pushed to the bottom.  We decided that they must be lighter than water.

What made this project extra fun was crumbling up Alka-selzer tablets and dropping them in the water to see the "brew" fizz and make tiny bubbles.

And, just because it's fun to be imaginative, we talked about what we would do with our potions if we were truly magical!  Would you want to make a growing potion???  Or turn into a frog???  What would you do if you could?

We also made magnificent masterpieces with paint, glitter, googly eyes, and yarn.

These are monsters you see, and every monster is different!  You can't do this art wrong.  :)

Our monsters each were wonderful in unique ways, and it was fun to think of ways to describe our own monster's colors, body shape, number or placements of eyes, personality, and hair style.  The final product will be displayed near the preschool entrance for parental viewing pleasure!

Too Much Fall Fun, and NOT Enough Time!

Ms. Harmony loves all the fun changes that fall brings!  There is so much to do and enjoy! This post shares some of the ways we've been actively learning about fall.

Apples are ripe and ready to eat!  We not only tasted apples, we learned about the parts of apples, and made beautiful apple prints.

We used scented rice, funnels, bottles, and acorn toys in the Explore Table.  This smelled amazing!

We built homes for fuzzy forest friends and made sure they had plenty to eat!  Fall is an important time for animals in the forest because soon they will face food and shelter scarcity during winter.

We colored leaf prints by taping the paper on top of the leaf and doing rubbings with crayon.

We cooked with acorns we gathered and sand.

We noticed that the weather got cold, and so did the water in our table outside!  We changed the materials from water play to bubbles!

We shook up sensory bottles with googly eyes, bugs, and bands!

We made LOTS of art with play doh, googly eyes, paint, fuzzy sticks, pom-poms, stickers, and more!

We sorted bears into "families" which helped us practice color identification, size and color differences, and counting skills.

We applied our knowledge of fall leaves and forest animals by painting a forest scene in fall and telling a story about the animals that live there.  They were looking for food, building homes, getting camouflaged, etc.

We talked about Halloween being a fall holiday just weeks away!  We played with lots of funny things like slinkies, bracelets, pumpkins, and googly eye glasses!

We danced with fall leaves, tossed them in the air, and pretended to rake them into a pile!

It always seems like a race to do all the fun stuff each day.  I wish that the preschool hours could STRETCH out so we could pack more into the program... so I leave it with you at home to keep up the fall celebrations.  :)