Fall

I love fall! I had a fun week teaching your kids all about it too. I see light bulbs turning on in their little minds and they're really understanding the things we talk about. I hope they're pointing out signs of fall that they're seeing to you too! The trees in our neighborhood are still pretty green, but we could see the bright colors on the mountain on our walk, and found many more trees just starting to change and lose their leaves.

Fall Math

 Apple tree counting. I printed the tree mats from Kelly's Kindergarten and laminated them years ago. They've survived many years already! I got the "apples" from Dollar Tree. They're just a berry bunch that I cut up and they look like apples. I store them in baby food containers. I also added acorns that we found a family walk last week. They loved that they were real acorns! The kids can look at the number on the basket and count how many apples or acorns to put in the tree.

 Fall patterns. I bought these pattern sets in a Scholastic book order a few years back. I love that they come with pattern cards. At this age, just matching the object to the picture on the card is a great beginning math skill. They were definitely doing that today! It helps reinforce colors too. One girl had to get creative because she was making a pattern that needed yellow squirrels, but the other kids had them. She replaced the squirrels with yellow leaves and made a great pattern! I helped them extend their play by helping them extend their patterns. We only did these simple AB patterns today:

 Here are some harder patterns, like ABC, that we will start getting into once they can all extend an AB pattern:

 I was surprised how popular these fall pattern toys were today. They also enjoyed just playing with them on their own, and some made their own patterns too (see the apple pattern at the top).

For snack this week, we had apples since it's fall! On Monday we tasted fresh apple slices. We had red, green, and yellow. When they each finished, they colored an apple to show which was their favorite and then hung it in the tree. When everyone was done, we counted our results on our "graph." 3 liked red, 2 liked yellow, and 1 liked green. I was glad they didn't all copy the first person and they each chose their real favorite!

Fall Art

 

We changed our tree this week too! Thanks to a parent helper on Monday, we painted our fall leaves. This has been a favorite art project of mine as long as I've been teaching. We painted with corn syrup. The kids got to choose red, yellow, or orange and we added the food coloring to their corn syrup on their leaf and they got to paint. Since there isn't orange food coloring, we learned that red and yellow mixed together make orange. They've been drying since Monday and were ready to hang this morning. The kids kept commenting on how pretty our fall tree looked. I have to agree! A few leaves even fell and they said it was like a real fall tree. I knew they'd been listening this week! I'll have to figure out a way to attach some of the heavier leaves. Here's a close-up of our shiny leaves:

 Today we did another fall art project, starch painting. The kids got to choose a fall picture printed on cardstock to paint. They added tissue paper squares in fall colors. They then paint over it with liquid starch. The starch makes the tissue paper bleed and stick. Some just enjoyed painting with a lot of starch because it was turning colors in our bowls.

 You'll notice I don't do a lot of "crafts" in preschool. Crafts teach a child to copy and follow directions and that's great, but our goal in art is to learn creativity. Even this week is a little tough for me to have ready-printed pictures that they're painting. I don't do that often. I love to see them explore and create whatever comes to mind with the mediums they are given to create with.

Fall Dramatic Play

 

We went camping in Dramatic Play this week. I honestly couldn't think of a fall-related dramatic play. Fall just makes me think of leaves changing, and the mountains, so that's why we went camping! A few leaves on the ground made it relate to our week.

Roasting marshmallows was the highlight of this area all week. It's just cotton balls glued onto dowels we had in our kitchen for years.

I was pretty proud of my creative grill I made. It's a cooling rack on a paper tray. They seemed less than  impressed.

 

 I found all the food cooking in the fire. Makes sense. Wish I'd thought of it!