New Updates

I apologize for not keeping our blog up to date more often. Its been more than 6 weeks since my last post but I will fill in a little of what when on in Sept. at our school and hopefully stay on top of October. We are welcoming our 2nd child to the world some time this month! Our school will be closed for a week during that time but we still have lots of fun things going on. We also have a helper that will be joining us this month to help me ease back into things when baby arrives. Keep watching!

Color Mixing Pumpkins

In October we are learning about pumpkins, fall harvest, and of course getting ready for Halloween fun. Today we learned out what happens when yellow and red paint are mixed. I used finger paint with brushed for this activity though I supposed the kids could have mixed the paint by hand as well. I drew a large pumpkin shape onto finger paint paper for each child and had them mix up their paint and cover the entire area. After the paint was dry each child got to glue on their pre-cut triangle nose/eyes and mouth. I cut around the entire pumpkin for all the little kids and the older kids got to cut out their own. All the kids were very excited to make their painting masterpieces into a jack-o-lantern!

Season Trees

Along with apple trees we have also been learning about the four seasons. This project took a few days but came out very nice. Each child created four handprints using brown tempra paint to be the trunk and branches of the tree. After I labled the trees for them we worked on decorating our trees for each season. Winter has silver glitter added to represent snow. Spring has pink, white, and green tissue paper to show the apple blossems. I used liquid starch, applied with a paint brush, as a glue for the kids to places the tissue paper on. Summer has 2 shades of green tissue paper and construction paper apples. Fall has construction paper scraps in fall colors glued on.

Apple Tree Art

During the month of September we have been learning a lot about apples and apple trees. One of our art projects was to make apple trees using sponge painting. We tore out the trunks for each tree from brown scrap paper and glued them down first. Then with green tempra paint and small pieces of sponge we painted grass and leaves. Last we used some red tempra with a different sponge to create the apples. The sponges were great because they kept all the little fingers cleaner than normal.

Fall Equinox Lanterns

Today we welcomed in Autumn with our Fall Lanterns. Earlier in the week the children used yellow and red water color to paint their papers. They were delighted to arrive at school on this first day of fall to see that their paintings and been magically transformed into lanterns. I cut shapes in the top of the four sides with an exacto knife and cut and folded under the bottom pieces the make a base for the latern. You can see what they look like without candle light and with. So pretty. We also made fall collages on this day and corn muffins for snack.

Fall Collage

On the first day of fall the kids made their very own fall collages. I ripped out pictures from the Pottery Barn catalog that came in the mail this week and got out some fall color scrap paper. Even the little kids are really big on cutting practice with scissors so off they went cutting what they could. Though a little rough around the edges I think they turned out very nice.

Caterpillar Pattern

R had a little time to be creative and was excited to show me the pattern he had made with our shape blocks. At age 5 he is all about patterns right now. After telling me the patern he announced, "and if I put the green triangle her it makes it a caterpillar!" I love to see his brain growing with creativity.

Fall is Almost Here!

Our pumpkin plant is growing fast. Although we had lots of flowers only 1 beautiful pumpkin arrived this year. Odd weather may have played a little hand in that. The kids were proud though of what they grew.