A Monster of a Week

While Halloween is not one of my most favorite holidays on the calendar, my children and my daycare kids love it.  Instead of doing a Halloween theme this year I chose to do a week of Friendly, Fuzzy, Adorable Monsters.  I had so much fun making games and researching for activities.  Even though this was only supposed to be a week long theme, it ended up being two weeks thanks in part to a nasty stomach virus that wiped out my whole FCC for four days and kept us from taking a very cool field trip to the pumpkin patch.  I took lots of pictures of the things we did, but something happened and I can't find them...ugh.  So I will try to re cap the week with a couple of the pictures I do have and tell you about some of the cool monster activities we did! 

We made Monster frames.  I bought some Crayola Neon paint and the kids painted the frames and then they glued lots and lots of wiggly eyes on it.  I thought it would be perfect for pictures of them in their Halloween costume!

For one of our group activities I covered a box with paper, added eyes, a nose, rainbow hair, and cut out a where the mouth would be.  It turned out quite cute, just wish I could find the pic I took!  I cut out shapes and passed them out to my kids at morning meeting.  When I called out a shape the kids that had that shape "fed" our monster.  Of course the box monster needed a name, so after much deliberation over names staring with M we decided to name her Merryweather!  

The most popular table activity was based on the book Even Monsters Need Haircuts by Matthew McElligott.  I made a simple monster head and taped yarn to it.  I placed scissors on the table next to it and encouraged the kids to give the monster a haircut.  We played a monster math game too, my kids really enjoyed it because I played it with them!  I made two simple monsters without noses and put a bowl of colorful pom poms on the table along with a die.  We took turns rolling the dice, counting the dots, and adding that many noses.  

Of course during Monster week we had to listen to The Monster Mash!  One day while listening to it the kids painted with potato mashers! 

It was a great week full of cute monster art, songs, and activities.  I think adorable monster week will have to make a regular appearance every year around Halloween!