October

October has been a busy month! The children in Pre-K, Kindergarten, and First Grade have been enjoying the changes that fall brings through exploration and activities.

On our early fall scavenger hunt, the children looked for signs of fall - leaves that had begun to change color, acorns, pine cones, and animals. We found everything on our list except for a web! Where were all the spiders?

Emergent curriculum

ADAPTATION and CAMOUFLAGE - When we found a woolly bear caterpillar, the children began to be very interested in how animals camouflage themselves. Since then, the children have been fascinated about how different animals like spotted lantern flies, spiders, chipmunks and squirrels can hide in plain sight because of colors or patterns on their skin, fur, wings, etc. We played a camouflage game of hide and seek, and hid our own laminated animals around the playground.

At the end of the game, there were two animals that had been hidden so well that they couldn't be found! It took us over a week to find them again! The children really understood how the ability to camouflage protects animals.

We found this spider and almost couldn't get the picture - it moved so fast, and hid so well!

This praying mantis was in our sand box. We took turns letting it climb on us, and then found a safe place to leave it where it would be hidden.

We took fall indoors for our LEAF STUDY.

We found leaves, sorted them, researched and identified which leaves came from which trees in the playground.

We created leaf creatures out of items we found in the playground, and watched how our beautiful leaves became browner and more crinkly as time passed. We named our creatures and wrote our own stories.

We learned about the parts of a leaf , and used our knowledge to describe our work as we made leaf rubbings, traced and colored leaves, painted leaves, and created beautiful multi-colored leaves or our own design.

We needed an ALPHABET CHART for the room, so we could see all the letters, and copy them when we needed to write something. We used beans (and lots of fine motor control) to created the beautiful alphabet letters that now hang on our wall.

STEAM - Making, designing, building

When I brought some dolls to the room, the children noticed they didn't have masks. They spent the better part of a week drawing, designing and cutting out doll-sized masks.