Mini Preschool Fall Theme

I mentioned a few posts ago that we had finished letter day. I was sad to be done with letter day, but proud of us for making it all the way to the end of the alphabet. I liked having something on the schedule every Thursday morning, and have been wondering what we are going to do now, to fill that time slot. Suzy came to the rescue. She came up with the idea to invite a couple more moms with kids the same-ish age as ours and do a little mini preschool, having a different theme for each month, and then each mom would take one of the weeks and have a different assignment such as crafts, music/movement, cooking, etc. When we get together all the moms come too, which is nice, since the kids are still pretty young. (18 months to 3)

Today was the first day, and actually, the schedule doesn't officially start until October with the Halloween theme, but since we were done with letter day, and I had found a really fun painting activity I wanted to do, we decided to throw together a fall themed preschool day for today.

We started off by going on a fall walk. Each of the kids got brown paper sacks to collect leaves in. Turns out they all wanted to collect more than leaves. Lincoln was especially interested in pine cones and walnuts, not so much in leaves. Between Lincoln and Ivan we also got dandy lions, flowers, several rocks, and some vines. Lincoln was very distraught that he couldn't climb up the trees to pull the leaves down. But I do think everyone had a good time, and it was a beautiful day.

I should also mention really quick that I cannot take credit for the beautiful picture collages. That was Cali's work, and I stole them off her blog. :) But I did not have any time to take pictures of my own, I was too busy trying to sheep herd three children (oh all right, Adelia was strapped to me, so I didn't really have to herd her, but still) along the path and help them pick up leaves.

After our walk we came back to our house and the kids each got to pick which fall color of construction paper they wanted, and then they glued their leaves etc. to their papers in a collage. I pretty much left Lincoln on his own to do his because I was helping Ivan and trying to keep Adelia calm. Needless to say, I think Linc used about a half a bottle of glue, and he still couldn't get his pine cones and walnuts to stick. Oh well. I finally talked him into trying to glue some leaves down. Ivan needed a lot of help, but he chose which thing out of his bag he wanted to glue down, and then I did the glue for him and helped him press the leaf to the paper. I like projects like this because all the kids did about the same thing, walked around and picked up leaves, but their collages turned out so different from one another. That's what makes projects like this fun. My pictures aren't near the caliber of Cali's, but here are Lincoln's and Ivan's collages.

The next project I was really excited for. I found the idea for it here. Each kid had some sort of box, like a shoe box lid, or a cake pan, or a cereal box cut in half with the sides taped up. Inside the box we taped a piece of paper. Then I took red, yellow, orange, and brown paint and dipped an acorn in each color for each child, and we put them in the box and rolled the acorns around to make a cool abstract fall painting. Once again, each kid's painting turned out to be unique, and they were all great. And here are Ivan's and Lincoln's acorn paintings.

Cali brought an awesome snack that was so tasty and still somehow managed to avoid all the allergies we have in the group (milk, eggs, nuts, chocolate). They were pumpkin cookies made out of a spice cake mix and a can of regular pumpkin mixed together and baked at 375 for 12 minutes. Guess what I'm going to be making later this week?