Halloween chains

Because of fall break and a vacation we were missing 2 whole weeks of preschool right in the middle of October.  I was really sad about that because there are so many great Halloween preschool activities.  So on our last day of preschool for 2 weeks I thought I would keep preschool and Halloween in their thoughts by having them create Halloween chains.  I knew that it would be a great undertaking.  We had to make a 22 day chain - eight 4 year olds - one adult.  Originally I had planned on using staplers - but I couldn't collect 8 (I knew they would each need their own) and then I thought that many of them didn't quite have the hand strength yet to staple 22 times.  So in the end I went with glue.  I would really just need to impress upon their minds the importance of counting to 10 while pressing hard.

Before I get too ahead of myself....

We started with cutting.  The night before I had drawn 11 straight lines on orange paper and 11 straight lines on black paper.  I gave each child a orange paper and a black paper and told them to start cutting.  The different personalities of children crack me up when it comes to art projects.  Some children just plow through those lines giving little regard to the lines or the straightness of their cuts.  Some children feel very passionately about staying right on the line - even having half the line on one side of the cut and the other half on the other side of the cut.  In our family Brock was the first and Noah was the latter - so I know how to deal with both extremes.  Fortunately most of my class falls in the middle of the spectrum. 

This little gal SO impressed me.  half way through she figured out she could put one paper on top of the other and cut them at the same time to go faster!!  I couldn't believe she figured that out and pulled it off.  I am ashamed to say I doubted her, thinking that the papers would move.  But she totally did it perfectly!

Then it was time to put the chains together.  There is A LOT of thought process to these chains.  The pattern, the correct folding of the paper, putting one through the other, the gluing, the holding, often the re gluing and the re holding, counting to 22.  Sadly this project took A LOT longer than I had allotted and half way through we could hear parents knocking at the door upstairs.  I asked the kids what they wanted to do... and they all decided to have me hurry and staple the rest.  So in about 2 minutes I stapled the last 10 or so on each child's as they counted.  Next year I will remember to leave about an hour and a half for this.  Oh - and each child wrote "Halloween" on a sign and we stapled that to the top.