Nature Walk

I'm taking E for a nature walk next week. My goal is to talk about creation and then let her discover a bunch of the things God created. We will bring homemade binoculars on the expedition. We will also bring a snack or lunch depending on what time we're going and some tape. The tape will be taped onto our arms as a bracelet, but inside out. Then we can stick small objects to it and make a nature bracelet. Other things we might do there, or another day at home are:

• falling like leaves, blow in the wind etc
• leaf hunt (find a yellow leaf, a small leaf etc)
• collect leaves and sort them by color, size and shape
• rake leaves (definitely at home)
• play in the leaves
• make a leaf mobile, leaf place mats (with contact paper), leaf wreath, dry leaf collage
  
• paint with objects we find outside (instead of using regular paintbrushes)

It should be a fun week.

Apples.........................

I think our apple week officially started yesterday as we went apple picking. We picked some Empire apples for eating and some Macintosh and Cortland for baking with. We also bought some apple cider and cider doughnuts, of course. Today E and I sat down and looked through the pictures we took at the apple orchard and then we read "A Day at the Apple Orchard". After that we ate one of our Empire apples. We also did some apple stamping, where you cut the apples in half and paint them and then stamp with them. I realized I'm not very good at cutting straight, which you need to be to make a good stamp. We still had fun!

Apples

So here are a few ideas I found for my first week of my fall curriculum. We will discuss apples and creation.

Yummy: apples raw, apple sauce, make fruit leather from the apple sauce, pie, juice...
Crafts: Cutting an apple in half (both ways) stamping with yellow, red and green (these will be the colors we work on this week), finger painting with apple sauce, finger painting with red, green and yellow on a paper plate, adding a stem and leaf (and possibly a worm) to make an apple, glue paper apples to a paper tree
Activities: read apple books, nursery rhymes, field trip to the apple orchard, sorting our apples by color, count them, plant seeds, A is for Apple, crawling like a worm, shape this week: circle
Bible: read about creation from a kids bible, verse of the week: John 1:3 "God created all things", walk outside and name different things God created

There are so many things to do, but I think this will be plenty for us.

These are not all my ideas. Most of them I
found by googling apple activities for toddlers.

planning again

Yes, I love to plan! I usually post things like meal plans or cleaning lists or such. And right now I should probably be planning a packing list for Sweden since we leave in less than 2 weeks. I actually have to plan a shopping list too since we need fall clothes when we go and all we have are summer clothes. But that actually made me think about when we come back. Summer here will be coming to an end and my favorite time of year, fall, will be on it's way. Which means no more "all morning long" in the pool and that means we have to come up with other ways to fill our days. Sure, we will still have cleaning (unfortunately), play dates, some running around to do and other outings, but I want to plan a weekly theme curriculum + a daily schedule for the days we spend at home. So far I've done a lot of online research and I want our daily routine to include:

calendar, weather, songs/nursery rhymes, story/Bible story, Bible verse
art project
theme related activities
letter/number activities
outdoor time (or music-movement when we can't go outside)
and of course free play

I'm not sure when exactly we will start this. We get back at the end of September and will need a few days to unpack and deal with jet lag. But as far as themes go I'm thinking fall ones to start with... apples, leaves, pumpkins and once we hit November we will work on Thanksgiving obviously, but also family. I will probably try and tie this together with Creation, throw in a few numbers, letters, shapes and colors and then blog about how much harder it is to follow a schedule at home with just one child than having a room full of children at school or daycare. =)