Seasons of the Year

Today we focused on the seasons of the year.  We cut a piece of paper into a circle and folded it into 4 parts.  We counted 1-2-3-4.  Then on the four sections, I wrote "winter," "spring," "summer," and "fall" respectively.  We drew and colored pictures of what trees look like in each of the seasons in their sections - in winter no leaves, in spring green leaves with flowers, in summer green leaves under a hot sun, in fall colored leaves falling to the ground.  I taught her the ASL sign for "fall" ( couldn't remember the signs for the other seasons right off the top of my head, or I would have done that, too).  I drew arrows between the sections and talked about how they go from one to the other.  Then we went round and round the circle, signing "cold" for winter, "warm" for spring, "hot" for summer, and "cool" for fall.  When we were done, I asked her if she wanted to go outside and see the leaves falling to the ground - of course, she did.  So we went outside (we took our dog with us) and ran around the yard, kicking the leaves and playing chase with our dog.  I was going to rake them, but they were so beautiful as they were I couldn't bring myself to do it...

Apples

We did this over the course of a couple of days, not in the order delineated below.  We started with the construction paper.  In any case, here were our apple activities:  

I took a knife and cut an apple.  We looked at and learned the names of the core, the seeds, the stem, the skin, and the yummy part (I couldn't think of its name).  Some parts we eat (and we did eat), some parts we don't.  

We played with the seeds while we ate the apple - we counted them and arranged them in different shapes.  And we sang the song "Ohhhhhhhhhh the Lord is good to me, and so I thank the Lord, for giving me the things I need - the sun and the rain and the apple seed.  The Lord is good to me...."

I took red construction paper and cut out some circles to make paper apples.  We made a construction-paper apple tree with brown and green paper, and she taped the pieces (with some help) to another sheet of paper, and then we put on the red apples.  We counted them, and we talked about picking apples from trees in the fall.  Because they were taped to the picture and not glued or anything permanent, we could take them off and put them back on the paper easily, so we could "pick" the apples from the tree, or they could "faaaaaallllllll down."

We taped the real apple seeds to the construction-paper apples on our construction-paper tree.  We made other similar-sized red circles from the construction paper and then taped those circles on top of the ones with the seeds on them, making 3D apples.  So the seeds were hidden, just like in real apples.   

Using the construction paper, I cut out a little red capitol 'A' and a lower case 'a'.  What letter is this?, I asked, and she said, "A!"  What does it say?  She identified the sound, and we connected the sound with the word "apple."  Then we taped the a's on the picture.  It's always good to review that stuff.

Somewhere in there I told her the story of Johnny Appleseed.

Then we finished and ate some more apples for snack time.

Pumpkins

We did this last month, too.  We cut out a big construction-paper orange pumpkin.  We used other pieces of construction paper to give the pumpkin different shaped eyes, noses, and mouths.  We used tape so the pieces could easily be removed and replaced and put back on later.  We made happy faces and sad faces.  We taped on different combinations of mouths and eyes and noses to see what it looked like.  She loved it.  She especially loved changing the emotions of the face.  It was interesting for me to notice that when the pumpkin felt certain emotions - like, when it was sad - she wanted to put it in time-out.  It became quite a game for her.  The connections she made between emotions and 'time-out' were interesting to note.  

We also cut out a "p" for pumpkin and reviewed its sound.

Numbers 11-20

So we continue to work on numbers 11-20, but it has been hit or miss.  So today I took a new approach, the way she learned the letters - we focused on just two of the numbers.  We did the numbers 12 and 13.  (I picked 12 because when I showed her the 2, she said, 'That's not 12!" So I figured she was ripe for 12).  I made a card with the number 2 on it and one with the number 12 on it, and then I played a game of "shuffling" them behind my back, putting them in front of her, and asking, "Which is the number 12?"  and/or "Which is the number 2?"  Once she had done that correctly a number of times, we added two more cards, with the numbers 3 and 13.  She started getting bored and wanting to play with her Elmo, and so we taught Elmo about the numbers, which she really got into.  I think this approach might have worked better, although she was still misidentifying 3 vs 13 at the end.

Magnets

Today we discovered the wonderful world of magnets.  Of course my daughter has encountered magnets before on the refrigerator, but we focused on them today.  We have a little magnet stick, and we tried out different things - blocks, our tummies, scissors, etc. - to see what would stick and what wouldn't.  "That's a magnet!" we would say when we found something that stuck, and "That's not a magnet!" when it didn't stick.  We made up a little song about magnets, which she loved.  We saw that some magnets stick with other magnets, some repel each other, some are strong and some are weak, etc.  She had a lot of fun just playing by herself with the magnets after awhile, too.

The Dropping Game

So when you drop things in a vacuum, everything falls at the same rate.  Since no one actually lives in a vacuum, though, I thought it might be fun to let my daughter experiment with dropping things and seeing what falls fastest.  We have some stairs with a railing, and we went part of the way up with 2 items at a time - like, a book and a wadded up piece of paper; a wadded up piece of paper and a flat sheet of paper; 2 balloons of different sizes; etc.  We asked, "Which will fall faster?" and then we'd drop them and see.  By the end, she was able to predict that smaller balloons fall faster than bigger balloons, which I thought was actually quite impressive.     

More Water Fun

We took a small bowl of water and some paper.  We tore the paper and listened to the sound -" "rrrrrip."  Then we soaked the paper in the water, and ripped it again - no sound!  Oh, she loved it.  We "took the sound away" for days.

Then we put a washcloth into the bowl, and when we picked it up the water was all gone!  We rung out as much as we could and did it again.  And we talked about how this is why we dry ourselves off with a towel after bath time - the towels take away the water.