All About Pumpkins~ A Post in Pictures

 I want to share about our week with pumpkins.  You can tell a lot from the faces and expressions from my kindergarten students.  Therefore, this post is all in pictures.  Enjoy!

Spiders! Spiders! Spiders!

We had so much fun learning about spiders last week!  We started off with a traditional KWL idea but with post-it notes on our 3D spider friends!

We worked on Facts and Opinions with spiders.  This is a fun way to work on this skill because the opinions on spiders are always so vastly different!

These Eric Carle inspired spiders were SO much fun to make and they turned out so cool! We hung them in the hall with our spider reports.

I had students choose three different colors of papers.  I used Astrobrights neon colors because they are so vibrant!  Each different page would either become the head, abdomen, or the legs.  The kiddos chose the color of paint they wanted on each paper and I let them "finger-paint" the page by spreading the paint around.  Once the paper was covered they used the handle end of the paint brush to make designs in the paint.  Once the pages were all dry I had them choose which pages were their head and abdomen and then cut them out.  They were allowed to cut them freely.  The different shapes of heads and abdomens made the spiders more interesting!  I cut the legs for the students using the cutting board.  Finally they were allowed to add eyes or spots from the scrap pieces to make their spiders even more original.  I backed them in black paper to make them stand out more on our wall.  I got this idea from Artolazzi which is an AWESOME site for educational art ideas!

We finished the week with some healthy spider snacks.

You can grab up my All About Spider packet by clicking HERE.  It is great packet for October!

Trick and Treat Blog Hop

 I am so excited to be linking up with my blogging friends from Elementary Entourage to bring you some fun Teaching Tricks and Treats!

My teaching trick for the hop is a math trick!  If you have students who are struggling with the concept of subtraction, this is a great hands on activity!  Students roll out the starting number in play-dough balls.  Then they "smash" the number that is subtracted.  The number of play-doh balls left is the answer.  It gives kiddos physical representation of the subtraction problem and they LOVE playing with play-dough!  It's a win-win!

You can grab up the original free version of Smash It Subtraction by clicking HERE.   I also whipped up a fun creepy version for Halloween that you can grab for free HERE!

Be sure to follow the links below to grab up all the tricks and treats offered in this hop!

An InLinkzLink-up

Spider Snacks with a freebie!

We are wrapping up our spider unit in class this week so today we made a cute, easy spider snack!

You want to make sure you don't have any nut allergies before you make this snack!  Luckily we don't have any in my classroom so we were good to go!  If you do, you could use a spreadable cheese instead!

Start by placing peanut butter on one of the round crackers.  Students will take 8 straight pretzels and place them coming out of the side of the crackers as the "legs" of the spiders.  Place a little more peanut butter on the other cracker and place it on top!  We used a little bit more peanut butter to hold on the raisin eyes.  Of course if they didn't want raisin eyes they didn't have to have them since spiders can have no eyes!

You can practice sequencing while you make this spider snack!  Click below to grab up a free copy of this graphic organizer.

You can check out some healthy snack ideas over at Nuts.com... they have a whole page full of great ideas for healthy snacks for kids!

Check back on Sunday for a full post about all of our Spider Fun and more freebies!

Stephany