Dear Families,

We had a great Halloween week!  We had all kinds of fun activities this week, and some special activities too!  This is our last week in the Farm Unit, next week we will be starting our Colors unit.  Here are some of the fun things we did this week.

We brought our gait trainers out to the playground.  The Spunky Monkeys love helping us move in the gait trainers.  They make sure to tell us to move our legs to practice walking.  They spend most of playground time walking next to the gait trainers and cheering on the Barnyard Buddies to keep them moving.

On Monday, we read Big Pumpkin.  We practiced using our hands and pulling the pumpkin, just like the characters did in the story.  For arts and crafts, we practiced our bilateral coordination and hand strength to decorate papers with dot markers.  In the afternoon we had our sensory pool.  We played in some very scary spider webs!

On Tuesday, we read Apples and Pumpkins.  We explored our vocabulary words "apple", "in" and "pumpkin".  We practiced holding objects and placing them "in" containers.  For arts and crafts, we made spider webs out of yarn and glue.  It was very messy but we had a lot of fun!    

 In the afternoon, we had show and tell!  Ryan brought in something special to show us.  We explored our new tactile visual representation for show and tell.  Then we took turns asking questions.  Ryan picked each friend to have a turn, and Vraj and Josh got to choose a question to ask using visuals and our buttons.  Then we explored the show and tell bag to see if we could guess what was inside.  Finally, Ryan took his toy out and shared it with all of us!  

On Wednesday, we had a special activity! The Spunky Monkeys came to visit our classroom for a science experiment.  We made "witches brew".  We took turns pouring the ingredients into the bowl and mixing up our concoction. At the very end, we put in our "magic ingredient" and watched our brew bubble and expand!

Thursday was our Halloween parade!  Our teachers dressed up as Snow White, Ariel, and Little Red Riding Hood.  We also had Olaf, Sock Monkey, and a Minion!  We went up to central office and showed off our Halloween costumes.  We met lots of new people!  Vraj and Dr. Conti (the superintendent) were both minions this year!  Olaf slept through most of the parade, but woke up at the very end to give everyone a quick hello before we went back to our classroom.  

On Friday, we practiced our Trick or Treating.  We didn't wear our costumes this time, but we practiced using our buttons to say "trick or treat" and "thank you".  Everyone did a great job of using their buttons to communicate.  Josh didn't come to school on Friday, but Vraj and Ryan brought back some special toys for him. 

-The Barnyard Buddies