A few shots from our 18th Annual Pumpkin Carving party. Have a fun and safe Halloween everyone!
Since we only recently joined in the Outdoor Hour Challenges we needed to choose a tree to use for our year long study. We choose a Wild Cherry Tree right outside my mom’s kitchen window. I think this will be a great tree to really display change in seasons… bright leaves in the fall, flowers in the spring, berries in the summer.
We gathered a bunch of leaves. It was very interesting to note the range in size and color. The kids, especially Fairy, thought the purple stems were very cool. Upon further reading I think I should note that Cherry Tree Leaves and Stems can be toxic, especially if wilted or damaged.
Another interesting observation was the texture on the bark. It has very distinct horizontal lines rather that vertical like all the other trees we have studied so far.
The best part about this tree… we can see it from the kitchen table. Although we love drawing outside, sitting at the table meant I was actually able to participate this time rather than just facilitating and documenting everyone else’s study. It has been a really long time since I sat and tried to draw anything… and of course I didn’t get a chance to finish it but what the heck, I thought I would share my entry this time instead of one of the kiddos.
If you have read through our curriculum overview for this semester you may have noted that we are supposed to be focusing on Tchaikovsky’s music. I had intended to follow a Charlotte Mason approach and choose one composer per term. Well, like so many things around here my moods and tastes follow the seasons and this composer focus quickly fell by the wayside.
In the fall I pull out all my Celtic inspired music. There is just something about October Project or Enya on cool, rainy, autumn days. It doesn’t mean that we don’t listen to classical music. Mozart and Vivaldi will definitely surface in the spring and the Nutcracker Suite will become a favorite in another few weeks but for now the kids and I are jumping around the house doing our version of River Dance. 😉
Our weekend: Family in from out of town, Halloween party at the farm, trip to the cider mill for donuts and pumpkins this time, Annual Pumpkin Carving party, a birthday party, a wagon ride, a bonfire, several costumes, hot spiced cider and pumpkin pie. Oh what a perfect pumpkin weekend!
I wasn’t sure if we were going to squeeze in the Unplugged ‘Thin’ Challenge this week but I managed to come up with something super quick and easy. We made collages by cutting old magazines and catalogs into thin strips. The older two kiddos enjoyed the cutting process and the youngest the gluing. They were only willing to spend about 10-15 minutes on the project though… wanting to get back to playing cards with Grandma and Grandpa.
Week Nine (Oct 27-31)
The Biggest Pumpkin Ever
Halloween Is
I is for Iris
We will be coloring the Iris page from our Flower Fairies Alphabet Coloring Book and reading the accompanying story in the Flower Fairies Alphabet Book.
Once a month, we will be decorating a 12 inch quilt square to reflect something we are currently learning about. At the end of the school year, I will turn all of our squares into a keepsake quilt.
After last week’s craziness we could use a quiet week.
Pumpkin Pie
INGREDIENTS
2 eggs, slightly beaten
1 1/2 c. solid packed pumpkin
3/4 c. sugar
1/2 t. salt
1 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. ginger
1/4 t. cloves
1 2/3 c. (13 oz.) evaporated milk or light cream
1 9 inch pie shell
DIRECTIONS
Mix filling ingredients in order given. Pour into pie shell. Bake in preheated 425 oven for 15 minutes. Reduce temp. to 350 and continue baking for 45 minutes or until knife inserted into center of pie filling comes out clean. Cool. Garnish with whipped cream, if desired.
Harvest
Now all the farmers from far and wide
Have gathered their bounty of countryside:
Corn and barley from field and wold,
Honey from beehive and wool from the fold,
Fruit from the orchard all ripe, red and gold,
Log for the fire to keep out the cold.
by Dorothy Hancock
Kindergarten/Preschool Term One Overview: Harvest Time
We didn’t get a chance to paint on pumpkins this week… instead we made these pretty cool jack-o-lantern paintings to set on the mantle.
First we outlined our pumpkins, their faces and a few other spooky things like bats with a black crayon. Then we painted over the entire page with water color paints.
The kids were pretty excited with how they turned out.
I want to introduce the self guided project Bug has started recently. This has been an interesting adventure for me as well. I love the idea of a project approach to learning and can totally ‘picture it’ with older kiddos but an early reader? How on earth was that going to work? If you are looking for tips on it I would recommend stopping by Camp Creek Blog for a bit. Some great food for thought there.
Anyway, we choose a theme together. I think any Magic School Bus covered topic would have worked. Bug decided on Inside the Body. Ok, so off to the library we went. I had him talk to the librarian about what he wanted. She showed him to the anatomy section in the kids department and recommended a DVD to him. So he grabbed that and a stack of books.
Now what? I let him browse the books and choose what he wanted me to read to him. He saw a big diagram in the back of the Magic School Bus Inside the Human Body book and thought that was pretty cool and wanted to make one. I suggested we trace him for the outline. He then asked for coloring pages “like maybe the heart.” So I printed one off for him and he matched the colors to a diagram in one of his books. After we put it up on his body he wanted another one of “the guts.” I went off to print something up for him and came back and GASP – he was drawing all over the body and the bulletin board. I caught myself in the middle of a “What are you doing?!” (thinking he was ruining it).
Bug – “Just drawing all my red blood cells. And look see here are some white blood cells eating these germs. And here are some blue blood cells that are out of oxygen so they are going back into the heart.”
Eureka! We talked about it for a few more minutes, I handed his the digestive track coloring page and then left him to it. Then next day while he was working on it he showed me a cut he drew on his finger and the blood dripping out. “But don’t worry mom, I’ve got lots of platelets here, here and here.”
Just a quick post this morning. Before Grandma and Grandpa got here yesterday we made a big batch of pumpkin muffins. YUMMM!
And here is the evidence of the kids helping. LOL! They haven’t quite figured out how to mix without flinging stuff out of the bowl. Size of bowl, size of spoon, sitting on a chair, sitting on the table… it just doesn’t matter. Oh well, they were happy to help clean up.
The recipe is on my Pumpkin Pumpkin post.
Does climbing an Apple Tree count as a nature study? LOL.
Just Bug and I did the nature study this week. Fairy and Pixie were under the weather and not interested in being out in the cold for too long when we had a chance to work on this. Apple trees in our area are pretty much spent for the season. We got lots of good apple picking in earlier this fall though and have made almost weekly trips to the cider mill. There are a couple apple trees in the neighbor’s yard and we choose to take a closer look at those for our study.
I read out loud from the Handbook of Nature Study while he colored a picture of an apple tree. We talked for a bit about grafting and why a farmer would choose to do that over planting seeds.
Then we headed outside. We made some quick observations before Bug wanted a boost up into the tree.
Some of our observations:
It looks like it has several trunks.
The top looks like a ball.
The leaves only have one finger that have lots of teeth (his words).
The apples left were pretty gross.
The bark flaked off easy in places.
The bark was gray with some green mossy stuff (I should ID).
There were no more bees.
There were lots of new shoots growing out of where some limbs had been cut off (which made it very pokey and hard to climb).
There was a grasshopper hiding on one.
One of the things I find interesting is how all the trees we have studied I describe as having gray bark – not brown. So why is it that I always reach for Crayola brown instead? Somehow I have been trained to think brown even though what I really see is closer to a shade of gray if I had to generalize. Kinda makes me wonder what else I haven’t really seen.
We did a lot more apple tree related activities in our Johnny Appleseed week and our Seasons of Arnold’s Apple Tree week. Or just do a search for apple on my site.