I already posted about the first week of October with pre-k, here’s what’s been happening the rest of the month.

Pre-K and kindergarten at my school use Tools of the Mind as their curriculum, so this year I’ve been focusing (in pre-k especially) on lots of activities and movement. Last year I planned a month-long theme like I still do, and maybe one week we read 3 books, another week we did a craft, another we watched a movie, and another we read more books. After learning more about Tools of the Mind I discovered that I really needed to be varying this every week, with kids doing activities for 10 or 15 minutes at a time only in pre-k before transitioning to something new. So I’ve been changing it up.

The 2nd week we sang the “Fall Song” and used these apple cutouts I made for the flannelboard. Again, I used a fingerplay from Simply Super Storytimes but did it on the flannelboard instead. I removed one apple each verse and we counted how many were left. Then I read Sixteen Runaway Pumpkins by Dianne Ochiltree and we counted all the pumpkins through the whole story. Then we drew jack o’lanterns.

Last week we sang the “Fall Song” and read Pumpkin Day, Pumpkin Night by Anne Rockwell and watched the first half of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. I had to do a lot of explaining to my preschoolers about who Charlie Brown and Snoopy are.

Then this week we did the song and read the absolutely fabulous Ghosts in the House by Kazuno Kohara. It’s a very quick read aloud, so then we finished the 2nd half of Charlie Brown and played with these genius felt cutouts of pumpkins.

I bought these last year from Vintage Home Style on Etsy because I loved them, but I never knew what to do with them. I found them in the attic this year when I took down the Halloween goodies, and I realized I could use them for a flannelboard at school. I arranged all the face pieces separate from the pumpkins and had each child come up and put a piece of a face on a pumpkin. And we decorated our Halloween pumpkins that way. They loved it, and it was really cool and relaxing as an end-of-class activity.