M is for Monster

With the approach of Halloween, for the past two weeks, our topic of study was monsters.

Our letter collection grew with the addition of the M for monster:

We had monster pancakes for breakfast.  Who knew that the addition of a few candy corns would make the kids eat their bananas with no fight and no one even asked for syrup!

We made monster cupcakes.  I love the eyeball decorations, we got them here, I think it's the kids' favorite part of decorating things.

I made the dracula, skeleton, and spiderweb ones.  The skeleton is my alltime favorite one to make, I saw it in a Family Fun magazine years ago.  It's so simple, you open the cupcake liner a little, place a half of a large marshmallow in and frost over it, then use two large brown or black candies (junior mints or m + m's)- you can use slivered almonds for teeth.  For me, it might look better, but I don't want almonds on my food, so I'll take the toothless one that I'm going to consume all of.

For dracula, I was inspired by a photo in a Martha Stewart magazine.  In hers, dracula was on a mini cupcake, mounted on a larger one posing as his clothes.  However, that seemed like too much cake to me so I opted for the face on its own and my kids were arguing over who could eat it.  I used sprinkles for the eyes and fangs and colored icing for the hair and smile.

For the spiderweb, you'll have to wait until I post my Halloween sugar cookies.

We made a page of "thumbprint monsters":

We drew pictures of a famous monster, Frankenstein, I love Addison's on the left, how he wrote "Evil" in the top corner.

We drew self portraits of ourselves if we were a monster:

Nathaniel:

Addison (again with the evil):

Owen (so precious):

Nathaniel made up 10 nouns, verbs, and adjectives that he thought had to do with monsters.  Addison used these words to practice his writing, he LOVES to write words.  Owen used them to try to write his letters.  Nathaniel used them to practice using proper grammar in sentences and drew pictures to go along with each.  I love the paper that we use to practice writing and drawing.  I got it at a teacher store- it teaches him to properly size all the letters in a word and use a space between words.