Candy Corn Pizza and Painting pumpkins

More Halloween fun!  We painted our smaller pumpkins yesterday and made candy corn pizza the day before.  Candy corn pizza is just cheese pizza with a ring of cheddar sprinkled on before baking to make the slices looked striped.  We make it every year and the kids loved it.  We also watched It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown which is available via  Hulu if you missed it on TV like we did.  We had read the book, so the kids really wanted to watch the cartoon. We also went to a Halloween party last night which was great fun until my eldest managed to get poked in the eye on the hayrack ride!  That child is so accident prone.  This is the second time he has ended up in the ER with a scratched cornea.  Boo!  He has to wear a patch for 24 hours which means he should get it off in time for Trick or Treating tomorrow night which is good.

Halloween Fun

Well all week we have been celebrating Halloween and of course centering school around it as well.  I printed off tons of folder games for the kids and made some of my own, and we are doing lots of projects.  Here are some pics of some of our favorites!

Painting with Halloween cookie cutters was tons of fun!

We made monster mouths with apples and marshmallows.

Of course pumpkin carving is the all time favorite!!

We made spiders out of oreos, pretzels and smarties.

These are just a few activities that we have done, and I am sure we will have more to post before long!

First Grade Math Coin Sorting

We have been working with my Princess on her money sorting and counting.  Now with my eldest, we had all this play money for this purpose and a workbook, but we decided to skip all that with her and go for the real thing.  I have a little basket where I throw spare change, so we dug that out and just set to work in a very hands on manner.  I had her sit at the table and spread a bunch of change in front of her.  We talked about the different coins and what they are worth last year so we started with some review.  I showed her each coin, and told her the name of it and what it was worth.  Then I had her hand me random coins and tell me what they were worth.  Next we took a pile and made a sort of graph on the wipe of board and I had her sort out the coins by what they are worth and compare amounts.  We repeated these activities for a week, and then moved on to counting money.  So far she is doing good with the counting dimes by tens and we haven't moved on to nickles by fives but that is our next goal.  Right now she can count the dimes and pennies together fairly well.  Yay!  I am really enjoying working with the actual coins with her rather than pictures of coins or paper punch-out ones.

I really should take a picture of little guy too!  He loves attempting to sort the coins with her, and can sort the pennies out from the silver colored coins.

My Little Man is Growing up!

My eldest just turned 8 on Tuesday!  I can't believe how fast kids grow up!  He had a super fun cookout party on Monday.  This was actually the first year that I can remember it ever being nice enough to have his party outside.  Thank goodness for a bit of an indian summer!  We had a fire and hotdogs, and cake and ice cream of course.  We blew up the jumper and everyone had a good time.