.png)
This past week has been lots of fun! We've continued to work on our circle time fingerplays and the children are nearing mastery on their favorites.
The children have also enjoyed creating some very simple games as their imaginations grow. The games range from pretending they are puppies to pretending a friend has fallen or is stuck in the mud. The pictures below show the children using teamwork to help a friend up from the "mud."
I introduced the children to a story called "The Hobgoblin," a tale about a creature who sneaks down from his mountain lair on chillly, dark nights and makes mischief in a nearby town. The hobgoblin ties together the tails of cows, hides the toys children leave out, hides eggs from the farmer, rings doorbells, and runs away. The creature continues to make trouble until the people gather together and brainstorm a way to scare the hobgoblin away. They bring home pumpkins, carve them with scary faces, and put them wherever the hobgoblin has been doing his work. The glowing faces of the jack-o-lanterns do indeed scare the hobgoblin away and he is never heard from again. I use toys and props that we already have to play out the story, and when the story is over, the children have the opportunity to retell the story in their own way. This time the children were enthused to use cherry tomatoes as the pumpkins.
We continue to work on proper writing grip and this week we centered on using hues of a single color over the course of the week. We used blues in one picture, reds in the next, yellow in the next and so on.
It's worthwhile for children to learn how to relate similar characteristics and create generalizations, and learning that the concept of "red" includes hues like brick red, fire engine red, strawberry red, and magenta will later help them make broader generalizations and connections across data.
The children and I have been playing many games of pretend trick-or-treat and it's been wonderful to see the two-year-old group improving on their vocabulary. The children have worked on saying "trick-or-treat," "please," and "thank you" and describing their imaginary costumes. Below, two of the children are saying "trick-or-treat!" We can't wait for Halloween!
The children have also been growing their Halloween vocabulary as we sing a Halloween song that uses the sounds of a variety of Halloween spooks to help the chidren vocalize vowel sounds. In our song witches say "ha, ha ha," black cats say "meow," wolves say "a-oooooo," and ghosts say "booooooooo!"
See you soon!