HeidiSongs Teaching Resource

If you cannot celebrate Halloween at your school, here’s an alternative:  Mad Scientist Day!  Mad Scientist Day is a fun-filled day of hands-on science experiments, some of which are done with candy!  The children get to dress up as scientists, “mad” or otherwise!  This helps keep the focus of the day on academics rather than just candy and spooks. I first learned about this wonderful idea from  Reagan Tunstall on her amazing blog, Tunstall’s Teaching Tidbits .  It sure looked like a LOT of fun, so I introduced the idea at my school last year when I discovered that the kids are not allowed dress up on Halloween.  (My new school does have a big “Pumpkin Night” carnival type of event right before Halloween each year, but the school day is reserved for academics only.)  My teammates were excited about the idea, and the principal was happy to give permission for this academically focused event!  So last year, both the first and second grades participated.  This year, the ENTIRE SCHOO

In this post, I am going to tell you about a really FUN, seasonal STEM project that I did with my first and second graders:  they made "Punkin" Chunkin" catapults with craft sticks and masking tape!  Then we measured to see who's pumpkin went the farthest!  The "punkins" were actually orange pompoms, so we had to use our imaginations, but none of the children cared.  They had an absolute BLAST! For this fun activity, we invited our new fifth grade buddies to come in and give us a hand, but I really think that the first and second graders could have done it on their own as well.  So if you are thinking of doing this with your own young students alone and without the help of older students, go for it!  I think that Kindergartners could do it too, but I would do it in small groups so that I could help those that needed it. My inspiration for this came from many different child constructed catapults that I have seen on Pinterest- along with a

Hey, everybody!  Today I am going to tell you what my class does each year on Halloween!  We call it Halloween Fun Day, and it is LOADS of fun!  We invite parents to come down and volunteer to help, and then we run a fun rotation of Halloween themed activities with parents running each station.  The parents and kids all LOVE it! We start our day off with a fun Halloween costume parade, with the children marching around the Kindergarten yard with spooky music playing, and all of the parents taking lots of photographs, of course! I LOVE to see the children so excited in their costumes!  They are definitely beautiful little people, and there is no better time to be a Kindergarten teacher than on Halloween!  (The only problem is the sugared up day AFTER Halloween!  Oh, no!  Well, let's not talk about that right now!) This is one of my favorite costumes! His parents told me that his big sister LOVES to dress him up, and he is very cooperative in that he will wear