Week in Review: Pumpkins

Our theme this week was pumpkins.

The picture above shows some of our pumpkin activities for the week: lacing, pumpkin counters, orange play doh and pumpkin cookie cutters, an eye spy bottle, a home made letter matching game, and a baby pumpkin.

I saw this post at ABC and 123, and used their idea to make the letter matching game. I did the alphabet in order, and also several words like "pumpkin," and "orange." Both kids enjoyed playing this throughout the week. (I picked up the magnetic wooden letters at Dollar Tree, in case you don't already have some.)

This set of fall themed lacing cards from Scholastic has been been included in several themes lately. Last year, L wouldn't have been able to do them at all. They're too easy for him now, (although still a challenge for V.) I'm thinking I may get some plastic canvas for L to start sewing on, to up the difficulty factor.

The kids love any excuse to play with play doh, and enjoyed making play doh pumpkins.

There were several pumpkin related activities we didn't get around to this week. We're currently operating as a one car family, and due to my lack of planning, (oops,) we didn't have several supplies. We'll just do them later in the month.

Although not pumpkin related, I finally got around to implementing this awesome idea, so my WordWorld obsessed kids could "build words."

Another non pumpkin themed activity the kids loved was the Cheese Its alphabet board from The Activity Mom.

We also did our usual mishmash of workbooks, handwriting practice, and so on. I'm having a hard time finding workbooks that suit L, all of a sudden. The kindergarten ones seem too easy, and the first grade ones seem too hard.

By the way, since you're here reading about pumpkins, go check out this great post full of pumpkin related activities from Welcome To Our Wonderland.

Below you'll find some of the books we enjoyed this week.

Leaf Week in Review

I'm a little late posting this week's wrap up. My mom is back in the hospital, and it's been another unsettling week around here.
We are starting our fall/Halloween unit, and learned about leaves this week. Here are some of the theme related activities we did:
We went for a walk in the park and hardly found any leaves, (because they'd apparently just mowed,) so then we went for a walk on our street where we did find some. We made leaf rubbings with crayons, and then I cut them out so the kids could glue them to these trees. (L did his own rubbings, the red ones shown in the bottom picture. V had trouble with the leaf rubbing part, so in the end I made some for her, and she had fun gluing tons of them on her tree.)

We did some counting, sorting, and estimating with the little plastic acorns and pumpkins from the Dollar Tree.

L practiced "picking pumpkins" at with the tweezing activity I posted about earlier. (I took a picture, but just realized he wasn't wearing any pants in it, so no picture. LOL)

We also did a number of non theme related activities. L has enjoyed working in the Draw. Write. Now. book, and also has been busily working in a Scholastic Phonics book.

Here are a few of the resources we used and enjoyed this week:

Fall Tweezing Activity for Fine Motor Skills

Here's a super quick, super easy fall themed tweezing activity we're been working on this week. The brown pom poms represent "dirt," and the orange ones represent "pumpkins." The object is to "pick pumpkins from the pumpkin patch."

Tweezing activity shown here, along with some of our other fall activities.

(This isn't L's favorite sort of activity, but by incorporating a few minutes here and there of this sort of practice, his fine motor skills have really been improving by leaps and bounds.)

Halloween Soap From Dollar Tree Molds

Dollar Tree seasonally stocks holiday themed silicone ice cube trays. I picked up some Christmas Trees last winter, and some hearts in the spring. Last time I was there, I saw these Halloween molds, and had to snap up a couple of them.

Skulls and Pumpkins

These have several uses other than ice cube making. They're great for candy molds, you can use them for molded crayons, and best of all, they make cool soap molds. (I haven't tried it, but they'd probably also make cool play doh molds for the kids...)

I made some orange and black pumpkin and skull soaps to put in a mason jar for Halloween, in the bathroom. They turned out really cute, and I tried at least six times to take a good picture of them, but couldn't come up with anything decent.

Take my word for it, and go pick them up, while they still have some.

Fall Themed Sensory Bin

Here's our newest sensory bin.

The theme for this one is fall. I picked up the package of fabric leaves at Dollar Tree, and while they were initially pretty crunched up, a few minutes with the iron on on a low setting left them looking much better. The little plastic acorns and pumpkins also came from Dollar Tree. (I picked up several packages of each, and will additionally using them as math manipulatives this month.)
I added some Little People and Little People animals we already had, and there you go, a little farm in the fall.
The kids can search for the acorns and pumpkins, pretend to rain leaves down on the "farm," or just free play with it.