Monsters, Mischief, & More!

Wow!  It has been a busy, busy week!  This week was all about monsters.  I have to say this is one of my absolute, favorite, all time themes!  The possibilities and ideas are endless.  I love teaching with this theme.  I use this theme with both the 3's and young five's classrooms.  Both groups love it!  This post details some of the activities I used this week in my 3-year-old classroom.  It is a great theme to do right before Halloween when we are talking about the difference between real and pretend.

During circle time, I read several books by Ed Emberly and his daughter, Rebecca Emberly. Click on any of the images below to take you to the links for these fantastic books.

There are tons of great monster books for this theme, but these are my favorites.  Especially for my little 3-year-olds.  The illustrations are fun and colorful and I love the flow of the text.  Rather than reading, I "sing" these books.  I am definitely not a singer, but the kids love it (okay...me too)!

One of my favorite activities to do with There Was an Old Monster is this story retelling activity from Making Learning Fun.  I have been doing this little activity for three years now and it never gets old...only better.  Basically, you pass out small laminated picture cards of everything the monster ate.  As you retell the story, the children get to put their piece inside a large monster pocket/envelope with a window where the monster's stomach would be.  The kids especially love when I shake the monster around and they can see the little pieces move about inside the monster's belly.

After reading these great books we did tons of fun centers.  Here are just a few.

This was most definitely a favorite.  I used floral aqua beads that I soaked in water overnight.  I added them to our sensory bin and threw in a few monster eyeballs from the dollar store.  They couldn't get enough!

Honestly, these are the coolest things ever!  I like to add them to my teacher wish list at the beginning of the year.  They are nice to have on hand for all sorts of themes and activities.  Click the image below for a link.

We practiced our 1:1 counting skills with this fun activity.  They looked at the numeral and counted the number of eyeball stickers on the monster mat.  They then added that number of googly eyes to the monster mat.  I am sorry to say I cannot remember where I found these cute little mats years ago.  :(

We continued to focus on this skill when we fed our cereal box monsters all sorts of creepy crawlies.  I had the children roll a single die, count the dots, and then feed the monster that many bugs.

Our art project this week incorporated some fine-motor/scissor practice .  BONUS!  I had the children snip 1" wide strips of colorful paper for the monster teeth, which we saved.  We used liquid water colors to paint a monster picture I found years ago from Mailbox Magazine.  When dry, we pasted out terrible monster teeth onto the monster's mouth.  I always love the way these turn out!  When finished, I cut them out and used black construction paper as a matte.

Of course, no preschool classroom is complete without play dough.  Here are a few pictures of the fun we had with play dough, monster style.

I hope that this post gives you tons of inspiration for monstrous mischief and mayhem.
Happy Fall and Happy Halloween!