Pumkins & Scarecrows

(2nd post of the day - be sure to scroll down to read/see pics of our field trip yesterday)

Today we finished up our pumpkins/harvest study! We are making Pumpkin Pie in a Bag this weekend when Daddy is home to enjoy it, too! I'll let you know how it tastes next week. ;o)

K worked on completing another paper mosaic from HERE...she needs a little help following the grid...She then decorated it to look like a jack-o-lantern...
She had fun measuring with paperclips & Legos for her math paper...
She used the orange dot pen again for a pumpkin book (numbers 0-12) and she did it all by herself...stamping the right amount on each page!


We bundled up and went outside to weigh & measure the circumference of 3 pumpkins. D&K chose to use the pumpkins they picked from the farm yesterday. For the third pumpkin they decided to use C's piggy pumpkin.

Before we weighed any of them, D & K made predictions. K predicted hers to be the heaviest and D predicted his...K's was the heaviest at 12.5 lbs. D's was the lightest. He was a bit bummed his prediction wasn't right, but I assured him it's only a guess & it's okay to be wrong with predictions.


We took yarn outside and used it to measure the circumference of each of the 3 pumpkins. Again the kids predicted the pumpkin with the biggest measurement around the middle...K said her's (of course) and D picked C's. The winner...K's again! We took the yarn pieces inside to measure...K's pumpkin's circumference was 31 inches! I used the weight & circumference pages from HERE for D to fill in outside with the clipboard.
We read the book, The Lonely Scarecrow today. It's a cute story about a scarecrow being friendly (but looking scary on the outside). The animals won't come near him until it snows and he turns into a friendly snowman. When the snow melts and reveals his "scary" face the animals remain. D and I talked about a few of the words in the book (marooned among the golden sea, thaws, combine, etc.) He knew everything except marooned. :o)

D&K colored & wrote their own scarecrow stories...

D's scarecrow - I love how he colored it so well! He even made the belt loops blue!
D's story "Sam the Scarecrow ~Once upon a time there was a friendly scarecrow in a whole sea of golden wheat. When a combine came through the scarecrow got sad. He was sad but then he saw some of his friends - birds, squirrels, chipmunks and crows. Next year, the scarecrow was happy because the golden wheat grew again. His friends like to play a maze game when they ran through the golden wheat. Then the scarecrow like to play monkey-in-the-middle because he always caught the ball. The End."

K's "scary" scarecrow & story (similar to the book story :o)...
"The Snowman Scarecrow ~ Scarecrow has a scary face. The animals didn't like him because he had a scary face. In winter, the scarecrow had snow on him and he turned into a snowman. He had a coat, hat & all kinds of stuff. The animals liked him and didn't think he was scary. They wanted to play games with him like Ring-Around-the-Rosie. They are not sad when the winter goes away. They like him."

K's scarecrow she drew on the back of her story...

D also cut out compound words & made a little compound word booklet.
D is a few pages away from finishing Singapore 1B...he's been counting $ and doing well! We'll finish it next week!

Pumpkins & Harvest

Today D&K helped bake pumpkin cookies & muffins (2 super-easy recipes using something I rarely buy...cake mix!). :o) We acquired the recipes from links HERE.

We used spice cake mix for the cookies with mini chocolate chips. Mmmm! I was surprised the kids enjoyed these over the muffins.

We used chocolate cake mix for the muffins (they took much longer to bake than the website stated). K did a great job mixing the cake mix, water & pumpkin together. She loved putting the muffin cups in the tins. The muffins taste okay, but the favorite of the D&K are the cookies!

We read The Pumpkin Book today where the kids learned a few new pumpkin terms and reviewed what they learned yesterday. We also read about more varieties of pumpkins and they're excited to see some tomorrow when we go to a farm!

K did a poem with 5 Little Pumpkins and I broke down and bought the Brach's marshmallow pumpkins for her to use with the poem. (We changed the poem to read "bats" instead of "witches" - you can print it HERE.) I will be giving the remaining ones away tonight. I can't have them in the house! :o)

K enjoyed using the dot pen to mark all her ABCs on THIS page. I asked if she wanted the color the stems & leaves, her reply, "not today."


D completed another grid puzzle today - a Jack-o-Lantern...
He began making a list of words about the harvest/what he knew about the harvest. When I asked him what equipment farmers use, he didn't know, so I showed him how to look it up on the computer. He discovered the "combine" and then I had him watch 2 parts of a video on the history of combines. (I don't recommend the 3rd part of the video due to the language.) The first two parts were interesting and he enjoyed learning about the farm machinery. Do you know why the combine is called the combine? We do now! :o)

D and I spent a few minutes looking up verses in the Bible that are related to the harvest. He hasn't memorized the books of the OT yet, but he knew right where to find the NT books! Gen 8:22 (I LOVE this verse - it's right after the flood where God promises Noah there will always be seasons as long as the earth remains.) Matt 9:37 & John 4:35 are verses about working the harvest ("people & their need for Jesus"). A little harder for D to understand, but he was able to find them without much difficulty! I know the meaning will come with time & study.

Storms & Pumpkins

We had an impromptu lesson about severe weather & safety today as the big fall storm came through around 12:30 p.m. D was glued to the weather channel - I'm sure he learned more than he wanted about the low pressure, wind speeds & tornado activity. I'm so thankful for our basement, as we hung out there for about 45 minutes until the tornado warning was lifted. We also talked about God's power - no matter what rages around us (strong winds today) God is more powerful! He is truly amazing!

Today we also learned about pumpkins by reading through the book From Seed to Pumpkin. I love these books, we have a few of them for other topics and our library has a big selection, too. D&K then colored, cut out and put together their own pumpkin life-cycle from HERE.

K is doing a great job coloring INSIDE the lines! She doesn't prefer to color large things and will often as me to help color an area that is BIG. She does great on her own with the detailed images!

K had fun carving her own pumpkin HERE. It's obviously less messy. I'm planning to carve pumpkins with the kids later this week, but D keeps telling me he doesn't want the mess. We'll see...

D compared pumpkins & apples using a Venn Diagram. He quickly learned how to fill it in (same characteristics in the middle overlapping circles and differences in each circle on the side). He also discovered that it is best to do it it in pencil (as mommy suggested) next time so he doesn't have to cross things out every time he makes a mistake. :o)

After these activities, we read two more books In Search of the Perfect Pumpkin (with neat facts about pumpkins on each page) and The Biggest Pumpkin Ever (a cute story about two mice who love the same pumpkin and share it at the end). I've planned the rest of the week to do more with pumpkins, harvest & Halloween.

It's been awhile since I've blogged about the kids math & reading...

K is loving her Earlybird math pages and begs to do "just one more" page each day. Today she had to color the longest/biggest items yellow and the shortest/smallest items red. She also was able to do some measuring using Lego bricks & paperclips.

She's moving right along in 100 Easy Lessons, too. She learned the word "I" today. :o)

D is finishing up Singapore 1B...learning about money! He's doing well and excited to get into "2nd grade" math next week. ;o)

D reads everything, but especially enjoys non-fiction books right now. I have a quite a few from the library for the animals class I'm teaching at co-op on Mondays. He has read through a number of these books already - he could teach the class! I'm also trying to get out a few each week to go with our theme - he will often re-read what we've read earlier in the day. He reads at night with his book light usually after the girls go to bed. He loves the extra time he has to "stay up" and I'm glad he's reading!

Our Apple Unit Complete!

After 4 days of eating, baking & talking apples, we are finished. It's been a fun unit! ;o)

Both kids completed apple math activities - D using multiplication (counting by 5's then writing a multiplication problem on his own) and K painting 100 red apples. :o) (These were both from making learning fun - link at the end of yesterday's post).
Then we read these books, One Red Apple and A Tree is a Plant, which each highlighted the life-cycle of apple trees. Drew & Kate are experts now. :o)

D colored the life-cycle cards, cut them out and put them in order for his lapbook.


He also drew a few pictures to go inside his Johnny Appleseed "Grace" fold-out for his lapbook. It had the little song from the movie we watched yesterday (the link is here - I think I forgot to post about it yesterday?!) and then the verse from I Thess. 5:18 "In everything give thanks..." so he drew pictures of what he was thankful for...family, soccer, food & karate. ;o)

He titled the lapbook himself (I'm out of colored folders or else it'd be red or green or yellow).

The inside of his lapbook...
A video tour through his lapbook in 3 parts. :o)

Part 1...



Part 2...


Part 3...



Over lunch today, we read two more apple books (Apple Cider-Making Days & Apple Batter) and we will be making applesauce & apple cider this weekend. MMMmmmmm!

More Apple Activities...

(2nd post of the day - scroll down to read about our field trip today!)

Yesterday we read about Johnny Appleseed from this book. D completed this map for his lapbook - coloring the states where Johnny traveled and/or planted trees.

For math, he practiced mapping coordinates to color an apple tree. He LOVED it!

K enjoyed rolling the dice to know what to color on her apple tree.

They both enjoyed the paper apple quilt they had to make using the small picture at the top.

All these activities came from the links from this website.

Apples!!!

Our unit for this week is APPLES! I LOVE planning these units over the weekend (late Sunday night :o) and a few weekday minutes the week before the unit. D is LOVING them and begging to do more activities each day - not dreading school - yeah! K is tagging along and I'm finding easy themed activities for her to do when D has to to do something more complicated.

We read this book from our library to begin our study of Apples...
However, on the first page we found something we don't agree with...that apples are 2 million years old. ;o) D recognized it as a false statement. We stopped & talked about it briefly. K answered my questions when I asked, Who created apples? She answered, God! When? Creation! Yeah! We continued reading about apples, the trees, apple products and varieties.

After we read the book, we cut open an apple from the side. Both kids were amazed to find a STAR! It was fun to see the seeds and the seed chambers (Did you know they're called carpels?) that we read about them in the book. :o)



D labeled the parts of the apple using this from homeschool share's website. (We're going to assemble a lapbook for the apple study this week.)


We had just bought 5-6 apple varieties this morning from a local store that had tons of apples for 49 cents/pound! It was fun for them to pick new varieties out to try that we don't normally buy to eat each week.

D&K wanted to sample every last one we bought, but we picked only 3 to sample today...Gala, Jonagold & Granny Smith. After each sample, D wrote the name of the apple and checked the appropriate boxes for this taste test fold-out book for his lapbook. So far he likes all of them. ;o) Did you know there are 2500 varieties grown in the USA?! WOW!

After the sampling, I saved the star shapes from all the apples and the kids used them as "stamps" with apple colors (red, green & yellow - we read that in the book, too).


At the end of the book there were a few pages with processes/recipes for apples. We chose to make an apple pie today...D kept telling me he doesn't want to eat the "chunks" but I'm hoping since he helped to slice the apples, place them in the pie crust and sprinkle the brown sugar/cinnamon mixture over top he'll eat it...at least a little of it after dinner tonight.

Both kids helped me make the pie crust - they were both excited I got to use my new rolling pin "rubber bands" that I bought in Amish country this past weekend. They are great to make the dough even when rolling it out!

D was very careful making slices...and I let K slice a few with LOTS of help from me.

The finished product cooling to enjoy after dinner tonight...

Happy Fall!

Despite the super-warm temperatures today, we celebrated the beginning of fall with a fun leaf craft. While the kids worked, I read aloud Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf (Lois Elhert) and the kids learned about chlorophyll. :o)

I found the instructions/pattern online here. We used tissue paper, clear contact paper & black construction paper. I cut the black leaf shapes out for them, but they did the rest.

D did a great job using the big squares just as they had been cut for him. K decided to cut her tissue paper squares really small before sticking them to the contact paper. She ended up just "tossing" a pile of small squares on - whatever works!They both turn out really colorful! They're proudly displayed on our dining room window.

D's Leaf

K's Leaf

Happy Fall!