This week we welcomed the first day of Fall, it has been a beautiful week in the mid 70's and all sunshine!! We, like we so every week, started out by making a list about what we already knew about Fall.
A friend of mine, and former colleague, who was also one of Cullen's preschool teachers at Orchard Park joined us for a day at Minnetonka Regional Park for a Nature Scavenger Hunt and to do some outdoor exploring! We got to the park and began our adventure by reading this book:
I made up a leaf identification sheet so we could try and match or name the leave we were collecting and I also made us a scavenger hunt list! The girls were so excited to go exploring! With buckets in hand, we were off!!
We had a great day collecting rocks, mushrooms, leaves, flowers, bugs, and sticks. The girls LOVED walking across the fallen logs and discovering "secret" places in the woods! It was a perfect way to introduce Fall and it have us a collection of new things to bring home and play with all week! We even tried preserving some leaves using Glycerine - they are laying out to dry now (we will see how they turn out in a few days).
I used a paper punch and made a zillion paper leaves for the girls to make projects with the little girls practiced their fine motor skills by glueing and sticking leaves on their paper. They were also working on color recognition when I was asking them "I wonder if you can find a green leaf to stick on your paper"?
Kinsley used the same leaves to make patterns! I love how easy it is to use the same materials and meet two completely different age appropriate goals!
Color mixing and finger painting go hand in hand with Fall leaves. A little dab of red paint and a little splash of yellow paint mix into beautiful shades of orange!! The girls spent a lot of time finger painting, they could have gone through a whole stack of paper without getting bored, but lunchtime unfortunately was our signal to wash up and save the paper for another project!
After the fingerpaint masterpieces were dry, I cut them into the shape of Maple leaves and added them to our chalk board!
Kinsley took some of her leaves from our nature walk and matched them to these worksheets to find the names of the leaves! She did a great job looking at the edges and shapes of the leaves to see where they best belonged.
When Kinsley was done matching her leaves to the papers she then labeled and colored them in! We cut them out and hung them up to display!
Another painting project we did was paint the girls arm and hand and stamped it on paper as a tree trunk and branches and then used a leaf shaped cookie cutter to add leaves.
Kinsley chose some of her favorite leaves to make into clay leaf keepsakes! We used air dry clay and rolled it out, then pressed the leaves in. I used a knife to cut off the excess and a few days later we were able to paint them!
Here is a foil leaf we tried out, it turned out nice, showing a lot of detail, but after a few it was not very engaging.
As everyone knows, Fall is officially here when Pumpkin-flavored-everything comes back! Of course we had to make a pumpkin dessert!
This dessert to so easy AND yummy!
Here is the recipe:
Cooking with kids is ALWAYS so fun; very slow paced and very messy a but always a great experience. Their sense of pride and accomplishment when their final product ready to eat is amazing!
Kinsley could hardly wait for her family to come home and finish dinner so she could serve up her yummy treat!
So much learning happens right before my eyes when the kiddos are "cooking" in the kitchen! It's amazing to see what kids can do when you just let them do it and encourage them to try. The best is when kids don't think they can "pour it, measure it, mix it" or "crack the egg" and witnessing the look in their eyes when they do - that look, my friends, is why I love teaching!!!
Ok... back to our week... we spent a lot of time this week talking about the different textures of nature. So, of course we did some crayon rubbings! To give the girls some things to try and collect textures from, I drew up a sheet with some objectss to try. Once Kinsley could see the different marks these specific objects made she was off running all over the yard making her own rubbings!
