Halloween in our Hood. And some spider stuff.

So it's the day after Halloween and I *think* I have survived the insanity. My kids are actually pretty mellow and they even party on the quiet side and I was still exhausted. Like 2 hour nap after school exhausted. Well, I'm also old, so that's part of it. Plus I had to help rescue a wayward hamster from the bottom of a giant garbage can first thing in the morning. I saved his life and how does he repay me? With a bite and a tinkle. And for real, just wearing this costume and swinging my new dreads around all day was pretty taxing. But seriously, how awesome did we look? I love my little rag tag band of co-pirates.

We don't have a Halloween party per-se. It's supposed to be a "fall festival treat day" where we do academic based activities and have a treat while we pretend it's not really Halloween even though the kids come in full costumes all day. Most of that first part is left over from the previous administration, so we actually loosened up the party part a bit. Nothing major. I didn't even get too many cute pictures. Turns out pirates are not great photographers.

Here are few snaps I managed to catch. We decorated some bags which we used to trick or treat in our classroom. I had asked parents to send in a bag of 18 identical items and then we put them in containers and piles and the kids trick or treated around the room taking one of each. Big hit this year: vampire teeth and green witch fingers.

We also played hangman with these awesome skeleton sets I got from Party City years and years ago. They loved adding the pieces to the skeleton as they played. I was actually surprised that a bunch of them didn't know how to play! I need to add that one to the indoor recess rotation. We also had a Jingo game which is pretty much bingo, but with a j for some reason. So my bunch of super rule followers were sure to call out JINGO, not bingo, then loudly chastise any poor soul who forgot and said BINGO. So that was fun. For them. Not me.

Then even though it was Thursday, we did Tasty Tuesday. And every time I said Tasty Tuesday they all said, but it's THURRRRRSSSDAY. So that was fun to hear all day. #notreally #ismiledanyway

This one's not in my pack yet, but I'm planning some updates soon and you'll be able to download the revision with any new recipes if you've already purchased.

Earlier in the week we did some spidery stuff, including this great freebie where the kids learned all about the jumping spider. That sucker can jump 40 times its length! We watched this YouTube video with Bob the Spider Hunter. My kids really liked Bob. He was pretty friendly and his passion for spiders was pretty obvious and not at all creepy. Then we experimented to see how far we could jump and if it made a difference if we were standing or had a running start. Check out these action shots! I wasn't wearing my pirate costume that day, otherwise there would be no pictures. (Links to everything will be at the end, as always)

I know you want that awesome ruler thing mat. It was from the Scholastic Bonus Points catalog.

We also played the math game Spider Legs. I don't have a picture of them playing #blamethepirate.
But is a cool game that's so easy to differentiate. The object is to be the first one to have 8 legs on their spider. They roll and can use up to 4 dice with multiple operations to get to 8 they can just use 2 or 3 of the dice. They get the hang of it pretty quick.