Witches Brew
Dear Families,
It's a small week with J and K gone, and we miss them! We've sure done a lot this week...
Monday some friends collected pine cones and wanted to drop them in the yard waste bin (um, yes please). We also got to use the saw for the first time and my friends helped cut some 2x2s to then attach them to a piece of plywood for the chicken's droppings tray.
We read Have You Filled a Bucket Today? By Carol McCloud. This is a great book for beginning a conversation about how our actions/words impact others. The premise, if you haven't heard about this book, is that everyone carries an invisible bucket and its purpose is to hold our good thoughts and feelings about ourselves. When we feel happy/good, our bucket is full. When we feel sad/hurt/lonely, our bucket is empty. What we say and do throughout the day in our interactions with others might fill their bucket or dip from their bucket. When we fill the buckets of others, we also fill our own buckets. This is a beautiful analogy made very simple for young children in this book. We've read it a couple times this week and each time added to our Big Book ideas for how we can fill buckets and how our bucket might get dipped from. We will continue exploring this analogy for offering kindness and how it can impact others, as well as our own hearts too.
Tuesday we began cutting into a pumpkin and pulling out the seeds for roasting. That day we made a butter, cinnamon, brown sugar and pinch of salt recipe, which turned out delicious. We also compared two pumpkin's weights, circumference, and height. Next we made guesses about whether they would float or sink and how many seeds we thought would be inside. Friends began making piles of 10 seeds for easy counting with our 'counting in tens' song. Counting began to take too long, so we modified and estimated after our first pile of 100. We made 5 piles of about 100 seeds each! All from one medium-sized pumpkin.
Another highlight from Tuesday was the creation of a recipe for Witches Stew.
I told the children they could put anything in the stew, but that they needed to create a recipe for it as they went. It went like this:
1 Cup Nuts
4 Pine Needles
3 Strands of Hay
5 Pine Cones
2 Sticks
Leaves of brown, green and yellow
6 Wood Chips
Some amount of sand...
This was so fun to watch play out in our inherited giant canning pot.
Wednesday, the highlights were our visit to the fairy village and lunch in the sunny fields. We added some spoooooooky ghosts above the village, but we decided that fairies are too smart to fall for pretend ghosts, so it was okay. We also spotted an X and a Y in the tree above the fairy village, so we are feeling pretty sure there are Letter Fairies living close by.
Thursday we read Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson, which was a big hit and was requested numerous times. It also inspired us to collect pine needles and sticks to make witches' brooms, and another batch of witches' stew following a recipe straight from the book. We listened to an old childhood favorite song of mine called 'When the Witches Go Flying Along', (easily found on Youtube) as the children rode their brooms around the yard.
Friday was the culmination of all the Halloween fun which we celebrated with creek play, pizza, Room on the Broom, Rice Krispie Treats, and freeze dance to loads of cheesy Halloween music. We floated 'boats' down the creek and then came back for some jack-o-lantern artwork in the classroom. Next we moved onto the front porch where six clues were hidden that gave a bigger clue to what a surprise lunch would be. The pizza went in the oven and while it cooked we mixed up the Rice Krispie treats and put the icing in a bag. Room on the Broom, the movie, was started and pizza delivered. This was a special day because they not only got to watch a (very short) movie and eat pizza, but also got to sit in Teacher Maddi's living room. Lastly we ate our treats and then played freeze dance while we waited to get picked up.
Take care everyone and enjoy the spooooooky weekend,
Teacher Maddi