The Life of a Running Momma: Weekly Learning Theme: Fall

It seems like every year as we near the fall season I mourn summertime a little bit. I love the length of light during the day, all the sunshine, spending so much time outside, all the activities through the summer reading program, playing with water and bubbles, splash pads, ice cream, and sno cones. But then fall rolls around and I'm reminded why I love fall. The trees with their leaves changing colors, the crunch under my feet as I walk, the cooler fresh air, wearing jackets and jeans, the perfect running temperature, fall half-marathons, pumpkin patches, and Halloween. Just like last year, this year's fall learning theme was such a blast. We did some of the same activities as last year, making them more challenging for Carter and adapting theme for Elise. We also added some new ideas I came up with or found online. It was a fun and busy learning theme! We did our fall learning theme later than we did last year and it worked out much better because there were more leaves and nuts to be found. We even found a pine cone! Read about last year's fall learning theme here.

Listed below are the objectives I am focusing on for the themed weeks. I have updated our objectives a second time because I felt like we were ready to focus on something new. I plan to continue to implement activities to practice and reinforce our previous objectives while putting more emphasis on our new objectives. Some of them won't necessarily be targeted with specific activities during our weeks, but I wanted to list them to help me remember to practice them continually. The highlighted objectives are ones Carter received exposure to during our theme this week:

Continue to improve fine motor skills and drawing (specifically I'm looking for him to be able to copy a circle and a square as well as draw a person with 2-4 body parts).
Understand same and different.
Accurately tell stories as well as retell the story from a book.

Use age appropriate scissors.
Develop a better understanding of time (for example, be able to describe when things happen using morning, afternoon, night)

Group objects based on a category (sort by defining feature).

Count and understand what the numbers mean.

Activities/Movement:

We went on multiple walks and hikes during the week in search of leaves, sticks, and nuts. One of our walks ended at a playground by our house where we found multiple trees with acorns beneath them. We had a blast collecting them to take home for our sensory bin. While we collected them Carter pretended we were squirrels saving them for the winter. He even held the acorns up to his mouth pretending to eat them a few times. It was so cute!

Collecting leaves on our bike ride to the park.

Collecting acorns at the park.

Pretending to be a squirrel.

Once we had our fall materials collected and at home I put together a sensory bin for Carter. He decided he didn't want the sticks in with the acorns so we removed them and put them in a separate sensory bin. He absolutely loved playing with the acorns. He would pour them from one cup to another and he also liked putting them into our pumpkin ice tray.

The sensory bin with all our materials in it.

Carter talked about the leaves as he took them out.

Scooping acorns.
Elise loved the acorn sensory bin. I let her play with the entire bin as long as I was sitting right with her. I also filled a pumpkin with acorns for her to play with. She loved dumping the acorns out of the pumpkin. To give her practice with fine motor skills I put acorns in the pumpkin ice tray and she carefully gripped them to pull them out.

I made a second sensory bin with the leaves and sticks. Carter didn't have much interest in it, but Elise loved it! She would grab a handful of leaves and swing her arms around. She also enjoyed hearing them crunch.

I sorted the acorns into two separate piles and had Carter look and them to see if he could figure out how I had sorted them. Then he added some more acorns to the piles. I sorted based on size, then color, then whether they had a top attached or not. When I pointed to the piles and asked him to figure out how I sorted them he was unsure, so I'd take one from each pile and compare them. Then he was able to tell me how they were sorted by talking about how the acorns were different.

Sorting acorns.
Inside a paper bag I put a fall item one at a time. Then I had Carter close his eyes and reach in, using his sense of feel to determine what was in the bag. It took a couple times before he actually kept his eyes closed rather than just looking in. I would have used a blind fold but he was scared of it when we were going to play pin the stem on the pumpkin during our pumpkin week. He was able to figure out stick, leaf, and nut. Then he wanted to hide things in the bag for me to figure out. He was thrilled when he put an outlet cover in and I incorrectly guessed it was a ring off a cupcake so then he tried to fool me every time. We then turned the game into "What's in the Pumpkin" again where we gave each other clues about what was inside so we could guess. Elise enjoyed playing with her paper bag. I just gave her a bag to play with and she enjoyed shaking it to make it make wrinkling noises and then ripped it. She was still playing with her bag when Carter and I were done.
I raked the leaves in our front yard into a large pile surrounding our tree. Carter even helped me rake for a while. Then he played in the pile of leaves. He liked jumping into it, but his favorite was running through them. He would get in the pile of leaves and run around the tree in the circle of leaves around it. He also liked sitting in the pile, throwing leaves on his head.

Carter really enjoyed blowing spiders across the table during our Halloween theme so we did the activity again with leaves. I picked different kinds of leaves to try and we looked at which one was easier to blow across the table. This could be a great experiment with older kids testing out surface area of a leaf and how far they can be blown although it would be difficult to have accurate findings without using a hair dryer or something with a controlled amount of air being blown. But it would be fun none the less.
When we were finished with the leaf sensory bin I pulled out a few leaves and we talked about how they were the same and how they were different. We counted how many tips they had and Carter was excited when he counted 5 on quite a few of them and pointed out that they were "like a star!" I was impressed he remembered a star has 5 points. As we were comparing them and talking about their differences, he said, "Squirrels eat nuts and sharks eat meat. They are different." I love that he was thinking of nuts and that somehow led to sharks!

Elise enjoyed playing with the leaves as we compared them.

When we were finished looking at the leaves I let Carter and Elise crunch them up all over the carpet. Carter did one and had so much fun I just let him keep going and it got a bit messy, but nothing the vacuum couldn't handle. As they were crunching them up I looked at the little bits of leaves and had an a-ha moment. I decided to use the crunched up leaves like glitter to make a craft. And of course while we were crunching up leaves, Elise attempted to eat some!

Our leaf mess.

Craft:

It's obvious at this point that I'm a sucker for handprint and footprint crafts so when I saw an idea online for creating an acorn craft with a handprint I was all over it! I mixed our brown and white fingerprints to make a light brown and did each kid's handprint. Then I added the tops with brown marker. I thought I was quite clever adding "We're nuts about fall" to the paper. There was extra paint so when we were done I let Carter free style on some orangish salmony paper.
I read an article that listed activities that help children gain finger strength which will prepare them to use scissors. One of the things listed was ripping paper. We've done activities ripping paper to practice on fine motor skills, but now that I have that connection to using scissors I've been trying to incorporate ripping paper even more. I pulled out fall colors and Carter ripped them into strips and then squares to decorate a cut out paper plate as a fall wreath. We also added some of our crunched leaves.

Carter loves using glue!
Last year I showed Carter how to do leaf rubbings but he couldn't quite color hard enough to get a good print of the leaf to show up. This year I decided to tape the leaves to the table and then tape his paper down so he could really focus on putting enough pressure on the crayon to get a good print. He figured out that the leaves were taped down so all he wanted to do was rip the leaves off the table and play with the tape. So he got one leaf rubbing made and then he pulled the paper up to mess with the leaves. Maybe next year we'll make some leaf rubbings! He did yell out, "What happened?!!" as he drew on the paper so I think the little bit that he did make he thought was pretty cool.

We used the crunched up leaves to make shapes on paper. I made a C out of glue and then Carter helped me sprinkle leaves over the glue to make a leaf C. He wanted to do a D for Daddy, H for Harper, M for Mommy, and E for Elise. Then he made a design out of glue and we added leaves to it. It was a lot of fun.

Here's a closer look at Carter's creation.

Special Snack:

We made some pumpkin waffles again and I also told Carter that spinach was a leaf when we were eating salads at dinner one night. Nothing too exciting on this front.

Make Believe:

While we were playing with the acorns in the sensory bin Carter wanted me to play with one and make it talk to his. To make it a little bit more fun I put faces on the acorns so we could play with them pretending they were a mommy acorn and a baby acorn.

Carter also liked pretending he was baking when playing with his sensory bin. He would fill the pumpkin ice tray with acorns and then slide it into the chair of his craft table, saying he was baking acorn muffins. He'd do the same thing with a pumpkin that opened, filling it with acorns and putting it in his chair saying he was making acorn pie. It was so cute to watch! When we played with the crunched up leaves Carter pretended to make leaf soup.

Making leaf soup.

Songs:

When I was playing with Elise I started singing "10 Little Acorns" as I put them in our pumpkin ice tray. I'm sure there's an actual version someone has written, but I just made up a version as we played.

1 little, 2 little, 3 little acorns.

4 little, 5 little, 6 little acorns.

7 little, 8 little, 9 little acorns.

10 little acorns by the tree.