Our classrooms were filled with fairy tale characters, superheroes, community helpers and tiny animals on Hallowe’en Day, and what a wonderful day it was!

We’ve been getting ready for the past two weeks to mark what has become one of the most popular celebrations ever:  Hallowe’en. Our home and school neighbourhood displays ranged from the adorable to the macabre. But in our classrooms, all is sweet and fun (we were gently reminded by our students, “not too spooky.”

We really kicked off our decorating with our Hallowe’en wreaths.  Our Big Buddies helped us with the tracing and cutting of the characters, but the funny faces and sticker placement is all Kindergarten.  This is a really fun activity to complete with our Buddies. Many Kindergarten children have become quite proficient with their fine motor skills, so our Buddies are allowing independence to reign and learning to provide support only for “the tricky bits.”

Drawing and painting our huge pumpkins is an art activity we very much enjoy teaching.  It’s important for the children to work on a variety of scales, and this terrific Deep Space Sparkle art project allows for the children to make as large a pumpkin as they wish.  We drew the pumpkin ribs with white pastel, colour mixed yellow, orange and red paint to create a textured effect and individually made stems and leaves. Aren’t these pretty? 

We considered leaving the pumpkins as they were, but the children wanted to turn them into jack-o-lanterns, and who are we to refuse?  Black and white construction paper and some new drawing and cutting directions (“fold your paper in half, draw a circle, and cut them both at the same time”) gives the children another practical strategy for making faces, and answers the question, How did you get the eyes to both be the same size?

This past Tuesday we had our annual Hallowe’en Centres Party.  Thank you again to the many parents who volunteered their time either through baking, running a Centre or both!!  The children coloured their Hallowe’en books, played with Hallowe’en playdough, made spider cupcakes and ghost ornaments and we finally finished our bats.  It was so much fun, and the chocolate cupcakes were as sweet and gooey as all cupcakes should be.

We read many Hallowe’en storybooks, listened to lots of Hallowe’en music and completed some writing activities, too.  Here’s our past Hallowe’en big book, “On Hallowe’en Night” that was the final literary task before we pack up our decorations.

Now, about all that candy you collected on Hallowe’en.  Every year Ridgeview creates candy gifts for our sister school, Grandview Elementary in Vancouver, the Union Gospel Mission and Covenant House.  This is a Christmas Buddy activity, and we use any Hallowe’en candy donations from the children. We would gratefully accept any candy (except for those marked with Hallowe’en symbols).  Your children can bring the treats they are not going to eat to the classroom and we will have a spot to collect it.  

Upcoming Events and Reminders

October Homework Calendars are due any time now, and into next week.  You can return it even if it’s not fully complete. 

Friday, November 8 is the Ridgeview Remembrance Day Assembly.  We have a very high standard of behavioural expectations for this Assembly.  The children are to enter the gym in silence, be self-regulated and very calm.  There is NO APPLAUSE during this ceremony. We will be reviewing these expectations (and others) and ask that you do so as well. We do not expect to have to remind our students about behaviour during the ceremony. Please refer to our previous post on Assemblies here. 

Monday, November 11 is Remembrance Day and school is not in session.