Pass the Pumpkin

This week we are working on O (for orange), 6, triangle, and the color orange. I read the story Pumpkin Harvest, by Calvin Harris. It summarized a lot of the things we have been talking about such as pumpkins, leaves, scarecrows, and jack-o-lanterns. It was a wonderful way to review things. I went over our new items to work on this week. Some we have done before so even AR knows what a triangle is. "We sang 5 Little Pumpkins", and added a new song "I'm a little Pumpkin" sang to the tune of "I'm a little Tea Pot". The words are: I'm A little pumpkin , orange and round, here is my stem, there is the ground, When I get all cut up, don't you shout, just open me up, and scoop me out! I read another story called "Oh My, Pumpkin Pie!", by Charles Ghigna. It is about all the shapes, colors, and textures pumpkins come in. At the end it has different things you can do with a pumpkin (i.e. roast the seeds, make pie). Then we played a game to help them learn their colors. It is called pass the pumpkin, it was hard for them to understand at first, but they got it in the end. You need a plastic pumpkin with different colored crayons inside. You have them pass the pumpkin until the music stops then they take out the crayon and say what color it is. The game continues. Each time S and AR would get the pumpkin they owuld try to take out a crayon, but were easily reminded to pass it. It was cute. The older 3 helped the younger 2 with the colors. S likes to say the color green, or at least that was the color of the day yesterday. Finally I had printed out coloring pages of a Jack-O-Lantern for each of the kids to color. M loves white pumpkins, so he left his white and colored the sky around it adding a moon. AP tried to copy her big brother, but had a little twist. The other 3 colored all different colors everywhere, very normal for the age they are at.

Falling leaves

So here goes. Today we started working on Autumn, by talking about leaves, adding in the letter L (for leaves) and the number 2, as well as the color orange. I generally work on one letter, one number, and one color per week or 2 weeks. We had an orange for snack and discussed the fact that it was orange and how you say it in Spainish, as well as how you sign it. I have cards with this information on it to to allow for visual learning as well. There is a picture of some of what I used today in this blog. After we were all done having the snack I read 2 books to the children, which were Leaves, by Kristin Ward and Natures Walk, by Ann Burg. We talked about where leaves grow and what colors they become in the fall or autumn. The next activity was a leaf rub, using leaves we collected on our "nature walk" on the way to pick up my son from school. I had prepared cups with peeled crayons in green, yellow, orange and red, for them to use to make their leaf rub. They really didn't get the whole rub thing, but had fun doing the project anyway. They colored the paper, made the rub, or just colored on the leaves. One of the children had a bit of a problem with that, thinking that they would be unusable after being colored on. I assured him that "yes they would work just fine for using to make the rub". Overall I think it was a success due to the fact that it kept them in some organized play for a short span of time, before they went about their free play. Which was spent mainly chalking on the sidewalk, peacefully.