Outrageous Opposites in October

I fell behind with updating our classroom blog, so bare with me as I do a bit of catch up. Here's how we finished out our Opposite October:

Big & Small/Black & White - The children were really good at giving me examples of what things are really big, and what things are really small. We also learned "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" and a new verse to the song, The Big Big Spider.

At the art table we did two really fun crafts. The first was making spiders out of egg carton cups.

The second was making beautiful black and white splatter paintings using chip can tubes. We rolled up a sheet of white paper and put it inside the tube. We squeezed a little bit of black paint into the tube, dropped in a bouncy ball, put on the lid and shook the tube. The ball picks up the paint and splatters it all over the paper in a beautiful pattern.





The results were so striking!

Rough & Smooth - We talked about how something feels when it is rough and when it is smooth. We felt different examples of these textures and made textured trees to illustrate it:

I had brown tree trunks cut out along with leaves cut from many different materials - sandpaper, kitchen scrubby pads, plastic, shiny wrapping paper, flannel, tissue paper and cardstock. The kids got to glue the colorful textured leaves onto their tree and feel the textures as they worked.





Loud & Quiet - Circle time was noisy as we showed each other what LOUD meant, and then we whispered to show quiet. I read a story called "The Old Lady Who Wasn't Afraid of Anything". This is an interactive book allowing the children to make noises, claps and swishes and the children told me which noises were loud and which ones were quiet. It also gave me a chance to talk to the children about Halloween coming up and why we shouldn't be afraid and scared of the things we might see. At centers, the children made music shakers:

I had a variety of jars and plastic containers and each child filled one with beans to make a shaker that was LOUD when we shook it, and they filled one with pom poms and Styrofoam pieces to make shakers that are QUIET when we shook them. We taped the lids on and the children decorated their shaker with stickers. Music shakers always go over well in our class :)

We had a funeral that day, so we couldn't go outside or to the gym for gym time. Instead the children got a bit of a treat and we watched a Veggie Tale movie for 15 minutes. It seemed fitting that we watched "Where's God When I'm S-scared?" It gave us another opportunity to talk about things that might scare us at Halloween (or anytime) but to remember that God is bigger than anything else.

Up & Down/Hot & Cold - We had a day filled with many different opposites. We learned the rhyme Jack & Jill and talked about UP and DOWN. The children really enjoyed this rhyme:

Jack and Jill went up the hill (point up)
to fetch a pail of water (touch 3 fingers to your lips making the w sign)
Jack fell down (point down)
and broke his crown (grab your head)
and Jill came tumbling after (roll your arms over each other)

The science center had a large pumpkin, some yarn and a scale. The children guessed how much they thought the pumpkin would weigh and how big around it was. They then measured it around with some yarn and we weighed the pumpkin on the scale to find out what it actually measured. We liked guessing.

The water table had a tub with really warm water, and a tub with really cold water for a sensory experience.

Gym time was fun as we did opposite actions: we'd run really FAST and then SLOW. We got ON the benches and then OFF. We stood up HIGH on our tippy toes and then crouched down LOW into a ball. The children really liked the action game and even gave me some opposites to call out.


We had a fun and busy month as we talked about Opposites, Thanksgiving and finished off with our Hallelujah Party.