FALL UNIT: PK-4

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Ana's Week

I love fall. The leaves changing colors, the perfect weather and signs of winter coming, the fires, and the signs of the coming holidays make the fall season my favorite of the year. So, spending a week celebrating fall was an absolute delight. The girls love being outside, so walking the local greenway and picking up leaves was Aria’s favorite activity. Mine was using the leaves that we collected to create gifts for the family, such as making leaf suncatchers and “stained glass windows” through lamination (aka I love laminating things any chance I can get). Both activities turned out beautiful, so I highly recommend trying them out if you have a laminator.

Aria and I enjoyed cooking together some this week too, and both dishes we made were kid friendly yet somewhat healthy. We made apple chips that Aria and Skylar absolutely adored and I will continue making them as they aren’t difficult with the use of a mandolin. My one piece of advice for this dish, however, is that despite what the instructions say, make sure to use parchment paper when cooking, as I lost two whole batches when they firmly sealed themselves to the cookie sheets! We also made homemade applesauce and used the applesauce to make applesauce oatmeal bread. Quite the yummy breakfast and a great gift to take to your host family for the holidays.

There are so many simple things that we did during the week that the girls loved. The great thing about a fall unit is that it doesn’t have to be complicated. They loved raking leaves that fell off of our one tree. Both girls loved playing in a fall sensory box and an apple pie sensory box, both of which were useful at keeping them distracted the following week during thanksgiving cooking. They even stayed busy for hours placing fall stickers on a tree that I drew and hung up on the back door.

The best learning activity of the week was when I drew a tree on the backdoor and wrote lowercase letters all over the tree. Then, I had Aria place leaf stickers with the matching uppercase letters on each lowercase letter. It took Aria a while (and I probably should have written the letters a little larger so they were easier to find), but Aria seemed to really enjoy the activity. For fall painting activities, both Skylar and Aria really enjoyed stamping Legos in paint to create Indian corn and using Q-tips to paint fall trees.
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I’m really happy that I chose to do a fall unit at this point in the year. Not only were the leaves beautiful in color and just beginning to cover the ground, but the unit transitioned so easily into our thanksgiving unit the following week. Plus, the activities kept the girls busy and gave me the time that I needed to clean the house and pack in preparation for my two-week trip to Charlotte to visit my mom. Far too soon we will be diving into the winter months, but I am so glad we took a moment to stop, look around, and appreciate the exquisiteness of fall.



Jessica's Week

​It's been such a beautiful fall here! Pretty leaves, sunny skies, unseasonably warm weather. Taegan and I took full advantage this week and tried to do as many of our lessons outdoors as possible. Since we didn't do a nature week this year I tried to combine a little extra into our fall unit. She used scissors to cut grass, made bark and leaf rubbings, and went for a lot of leaf crunching hikes. We also collected, dissected, and counted acorns then stored some in our paper towel tree and left the rest in a pile on the driveway for neighborhood critters. It was great to watch an assortment of squirrels and chipmunks feasting throughout the week. 

I planned to make a trip to the apple orchard and but cancelled in favor of spending the day at a friends farm playing hide and seek in their hayloft. It may not have been super "fall" related but it definitely brought us closer to nature!
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Over the weekend our family thoroughly enjoyed celebrating pumpkin day...something we decided to make a big deal out of after reading "Pumpkin Day" by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace last year. We had pumpkin pancakes and homemade psl (or pumpkin steamed milk) for breakfast before heading out to pick our jack o lantern. We learned about the parts of a pumpkin and how they grow by planting our own garden variety but unfortunately our biggest take was smaller than my fist so we had to venture out for something bigger to carve. This was the first year Taegan actually got into cleaning out the inside instead of being upset by the gooey mess of it all.  We roasted pumpkin seeds and baked a pie together for dessert. A perfect end to pumpkin day was visiting Freeport PA for the pumpkin trail. They have an evening walk where locals contribute hundreds of different jack o lantern faces to see...We loved this event and hope to one day contribute a pumpkin of our own.