Faith of a Jack-O-Lantern

In the fall we use pumpkins for many different things: making yummy treats, decorating for Thanksgiving, carving Jack-O-Lanterns for Halloween, etc.  But I bet you didn't know you could use a Jack-O-Lantern, a simple Halloween decoration, to share your faith!

Mrs. Straessle shared a wonderful poem during one of our religion lessons, 

"Shine With The Light Of Jesus."

Let me shine with the light of Jesus

Let my eyes see the beauty all around

Never let me turn up my nose to others

And let my mouth share the good news I have found!

We then colored and assembled our own Jack-O-Lanterns to hang in the "big building" for all of the school to see!

As a fun review of our number of the week, 5, we watched a fun video that taught us the song of the Five Little Pumpkins Sitting On A Gate.

We then made our own 5 Little Pumpkin artwork!  They all turned out so great!

This week we learned that just like our pumpkins, all different and unique, so are our families!  

After sharing our family photos with our classmates, we observed the many differences of our families: number of family members, number of brothers and sisters, twins, etc.  It was fun to watch all of the students identify with one another in their similarities! 

After discussing all of our family similarities and differences we created our own family portraits.  I am so pleased with how far our coloring skills have come in our short time together!

Look at these sweet faces, so happy to share their family portraits with their friends!

In honor of National Bullying Awareness Day, Holy Souls teachers and students wore blue shirts.  We discussed the way a bully acts, how they make others feel with their hurtful words and actions, and made a pledge to be nice to everyone we meet.  PreK B is helping to make Holy Souls bully free!

Happy 5th Birthday to our two Hoots born in early October, Cameron and Dawson!  Thanks for sharing yummy cupcakes, rice krispie treats, and candy corn with us on your special day!

Sort, Compare, and Contrast

This past week our theme was all about being a helper. 

After learning what it takes to be a good helper: always doing a job correctly the first time so you don't have to do it over, always complete the tasks you say you will, and to do the job with a happy heart we charted ways that we could help at home and at school!

While learning about being good helpers we read the classic story "The Little Red Hen."  We learned that there can be different versions of the same story and that we could compare and contrast the story characters, plot details, and outcome.

After reading three versions of "The Little Red Hen" we made Little Red Hens of our own!

We cut out the hen body, the field of wheat that she worked in, and gave her an eye and a tail feather.

How cute are these hens?!

This week we continued to work on our sorting skills by using one of my favorite fall candies...candy corn!  We observed that although our bag of candy only contained candy corn, it contained different kinds of candy corn.  So first we had to sort our bag.

  Then we determined that we had made three different sets of candy corn.  Chocolate, vanilla, and pumpkins.

We then graphed our findings by counting the number of each type of candy corn and shading in a tile on the graph.  As a class we had the most of the vanilla candy corn.

Then each student got their own cup of candy corn to sort, count, and graph on their own. 

Everyone did such a wonderful job working independently!  Maybe it was the promise of eating a piece of candy corn when the activity was over!

This week we learned about secondary colors!  

We learned that if you take two primary colors, we used yellow and blue,

and mix them together

that you make GREEN!

So after reading one of Mrs. Straessle's favorite Halloween books, "The Big Green Monster", we put our paint mixing skills to use and made our own Big Green Monsters!

The Big Green Monster has two little squiggly ears,

a long bluish-greenish nose,

two big yellow eyes,

a big red mouth,

with sharp white teeth,

scraggly purple hair,

and a big green scary face!

But we aren't afraid of the Big Green Monster!  We think he's a perfect decoration for our classroom for Halloween.  :)

Our final activity of the week was to make new decorations for the windows for October.  As I'm sure you guessed, we made pumpkins!

PreK B is definitely the pick of the patch!