So Long Halloween, I'm Feelin' Fall-y!

Yay! It's Saturday! Though I always get excited it's the weekend, I usually spend most of my time catching up on school work that I never got to during the week. It is absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to catch up! Every time I think "Wow, I really accomplished a lot!" I turn around and remember 15 other important things that I need to do. Ahhhh, the life of a teacher :) Boy is it fun though!

Well Halloween was a fabulous time in our classroom! We had such a blast! Here's the low-down on what we did! I loved our pumpkin unit. There is so much fun to be had when it comes to pumpkins! You can see some of our fun creations later in this post in our fall display. One exciting part of the unit that the kids are always "pump"ed (haha gosh, I'm clever) about is pumpkin carving!! Before the scooping began, I passed out small papers with blank pumpkins on them. I asked the students to draw a picture of the jack-o-lantern that they would want us to carve. They did an awesome job! We then voted as a class which we liked best. Here were our winners:

 After the vote, it was time to get down to business. I brought in 3 pumpkins and put the class into 3 groups. Some of them had never scooped a pumpkin before! Most of them were thrilled to touch all the goopy yuck, but two of them literally threw up. Good grief.

 And after all the scooping, we carved them together. We did our very best to make them look like the pumpkins we voted for. Unfortunately the pumpkin on the left was supposed to have one tooth but it broke off as we pulled the mouth out. It worked out ok though, we just called him our "Happy Pumpkin"!

 

 And of course the best part of carving pumpkins is eating the seeds!! They LOVED them!!

 And then it was the glorious day itself! HALLOWEEN! We all dressed up in costumes and went trick-or-treating around the school!

I am the big pumpkin in the middle! And just to be clear - despite how it appears in this picture, I have two legs. The witch on my right is my intern Chelsea and the pumpkin on my left is my fellow kindergarten teacher (and good buddy) Amanda.

 The kids looked spookalicious in their adorable costumes!

 

 After our fun trick-or-treating adventure, we came back to the room for our Halloween party! There was freaky food, gory games, and creepy crafts galore!

Our "Witches Brew" made with lime sherbet (my kids called this lizard guts), pineapple juice, and gingerale. And don't forget the hand!! This is always a winner!

 

We also made little witches broomsticks with pretzels and reeses!

 

Making "Spageletons" - Skeletons out of spaghetti (I was so proud when I came up with the name!)

Making graveyards with chocolate pudding, oreo crumbles, gummy worms, and milano cookies (tombstones)

Pumpkin Bowling!

Pumpkin Painting

The snack table! YUM!!

One of my kids moms brought this in! They were so cute and the kids gobbled them up!

 And just like that Halloween is over! I love holidays (maybe more than the kids! Ha!) In the aftermath of all our spooky fun, I finally got my fall decorations up this week. I felt awful that it took me 7 days into November to get them up. I spent lots of money and even more time to make it festive, but it was well worth it! It looks adorable and my kids were ecstatic when they came in. So here's how it came out:

The inside of our room!

The hallway right outside of our room! The kids loved all the pumpkin activities that we did. You may be wondering why I have 600 scarecrows. All I have to say is: Sale. At Michaels. No self-control.

In the middle row of the wall are our 'Pumpkin Life Stage" projects. After reading "The Pumpkin Book" by Gail Gibbons, the kids colored and cut out the life stages (seen above) and glued them in order on a piece of string. They then made pumpkins from paper plates and glued the string to the top to become the vine!

Don't you just love our little pumpkin patch? The kids made the little orange pumpkins and they came out great. They stuffed paper bags with newspaper and closed the top with a rubberband. They then painted them orange and brown (stem) and added a green pipe cleaner to hide the rubberband and become the vine! At the end of the vine is a little green leaf that has each child's name on it.

Our Pumpkin Diagrams - these were super easy to make! I printed all the words on labels and all the kids had to do was stick them on the correct place instead of messing with sticky glue!

"Leaf Pile Kids" - Super cute! I got this idea from April Larremore's blog and created my own templates.

 So there we have it! I hope you are getting ready to cozy up and enjoy the season. The very best time of the year has just begun! Here's to a fabulous fall ya'll!