September seems so long ago! We have grown so much over the past few months.
We began our unit on line and shape by reading "Lines That Wiggle" by Candace Whitman. Then we played with cold, cooked, red spaghetti noodles that were coated with a bit of vegetable oil to avoid sticking. This combination always elicits a wide variety of comments! They were given time to explore and create shapes.
This activity involved building squares and triangles. The kiddos decorated jumbo craft sticks and glued them together. They glued pom poms on the angles. We counted and recorded how many sides and angles that each shape had.
The kiddos enjoyed our unit on trees and leaves. They used paper shapes to create trees in art and painted leaves on them.
We went outside and sketched the trees in the forest on our property. We read "Where the Wild Things Are" by Maurice Sendak and had a wild rumpus on the playground.
The kiddos created their own wild things with rainbow play dough and bits and pieces from our craft supplies.
We have show and share every week. The kiddos brought in autumn leaves and we sorted them by color.
Then, we explored the leaves, made leaf rubbings and recorded our observations.
In October, we visited the farm.
A fun activity that all the kiddos love is making geo-designs with push pins and rubber bands on pumpkins. It is a great spatial activity that helps us to develop our fine motor skills.
Some other farm sensory exploration included "The Little Red Hen" wheat play dough, as well as corn kernels in our sensory table.
Yikes!!!!!! He has spiders in his hair! Plastic ones of course. One of my favorite songs to do in the fall is "Spider on the Floor" by Raffi.
We studied these 8 legged creepy crawlers by reading many books and weaving our own webs with black yarn and fiber fill (the stuffing in pillows).
Next up...the dinosaurs. Check out one of our favorite Storybots songs about the triceratops.
We also explored fossils through art...
and excavating our own "fossils" (i.e. plastic dinosaurs baked into coffee/salt dough).
We used hands on exploration to figure out how we could make the tallest stack of rocks.
During our rock research we learned that some igneous rocks float. The kiddos said no way a rock would ever float. We took this opportunity to do an experiment. I have a large box of rocks that I have collected over the years. We chose several likely candidates. We almost gave up, but the LAST one we dropped in floated! The kiddos were so excited that you could hear them cheering upstairs! I have to admit, I was excited too :-)
I am thankful for my kiddos. They bring me joy and make life fun!
