Week 9 with the 4's: Review and Some Haloween Fun

Due to more illness, I only had the 4's for one day this week (the sick one this time was ME!) But we did lots of fun activities as part of our review week. We started with calendar time and we spent a lot of time focusing on the numbers in the 20's...counting, and identifying numbers that high is still a bit challenging. We also read the story of the Generous Widow (Mark 12:41-44) since this is a story we didn't get to in earlier weeks. We talked a lot about what it means to be generous. And the kids were able to retell the story to the other moms later, which was great to see.

We read The Day Jimmy Boa Ate the Wash, and Charming Opal. And we enjoyed some Halloween-y snacks.

 

We also did a letter hunt. I placed some note cards with all the letters we've talked about so far this year on them. Then I gave the kids scissors and magazines and they had to find the letters in the magazines, cut them out and glue them to the cards.

 

Next we did some name-writing practice. They wrote their first and last names.

 

Nice work, Jack!

To get us in the mood for Halloween, we used candy corns to practice sorting into number groups. I gave the kids sticky notes with the numbers 1-5 written on them. They had to use tweezers to put the candy into piles of the correct number...and they couldn't use their fingers at all! This was a good workout for those little hand muscles.

 

Then we used pattern blocks to work on visual perception skills. I made a shape out of a few blocks, and asked the kids to copy me and make the same shape with their blocks. Noah was GREAT at this. He got it right away and was able to help the others.

We also had some free time making pictures out of these blocks. I have some picture cards that we will use with this set soon...Addison loves these blocks so much, she asks to "do puzzles" often.

 

We worked on balance by walking on the garden hose...

 

And for the grand finale of review week, we played with catapults! I made these out of sticks, plastic spoons, and rubber bands I found the basic instructions here. We launched candy corns, candy pumpkins, and pom-poms. We had contests to see who could shoot the farthest, and which projectile flew the best. We all agreed the pom-poms were best!

Look at the anticipation!

 

Great work kiddos!