For preschool this week we took a break from the alphabet to do a unit study on fall. I love everything about the fall. It's my favorite time of year. Before I start on our fall unit though, I'll explain about Monday.
Monday was Columbus Day, and fortunately, I remembered before the day of, and was able to do some preparation. We took the opportunity to study Columbus. First I let the kids watch a fun cartoon from the Animated Hero Classics series. I found this on youtube. It's 20-ish minutes long, and was easy enough for both my preschooler and Kindergartener to understand.
Then we did an art project. I used this pattern for our ships and sails and Columbus, but our project is different than hers.
Lincoln was very adamant that his ships be sailing west, so I showed him how to draw a compass, and then he copied it onto his paper to show his ships going in the right direction.
Now back to our fall unit. It was my turn to host the co-op preschool this week. When the kids arrived, I had little fake dollar store leaves taped up all around the room. They had to collect them, and then we graphed them by color and talked about which color had most, and which color had least, etc.
We talked about fall colors. And then we did an abstract fall color painting using marbles. Basically, you put an 8 1/2x11 piece of paper into a 9x13 pan, the higher the sides of the pan the better for preschoolers. Then you put the marbles into different colors of paint, in this case we did orange, brown, red, and yellow. Then each child gets one marble of each color in their pan, and they roll the marbles around and around, and it makes a pretty design.
Next we had sliced apples and Pumpkin Spice hot chocolate for a treat while we talked about the fall harvest, and how fall is the time of year to pick all the things that were growing in your garden all summer long.
Then we practiced writing our names. If you look closely you can see that Ivan got all the letters of his name in there. We're still working on getting them to be in the right order and not so microscopic. :) Then we glued some foam leaves onto our fall trees.
Our last activity for co-op was to go outside and work on our fine motor skills. Each child got a small pumpkin with their first initial on it, a golf tee, and something they could use to hammer with. (I only had 3 hammers so one of the kids got a meat tenderizer and another got a wooden stake, but they got the job done.) They hammered holes into their pumpkins to trace the letters. This was their favorite activity by far.
We made sure to go on plenty of fall outings this week to enjoy the leaves, the crisp air, and a pumpkin patch or two.
And for our last project of the week, we made hand print and tissue paper trees.
We read a lot of great fall books to go along with our theme this week. A few of my favorite are:
Wild Child by Lynn Plourde 
Pumpkin Soup by Helen Cooper
Leaves by David Ezra Stein
When the Leaf Blew In by Steve Metzger 
Why Do Leaves Change Color? by Betsy Maestro
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