Autumn

We had another rainy, wet week (at least the beginning part of it) so we still never made it out to collect leaves and acorns.   Instead of postponing our Fall activities even longer I went ahead with a slightly modified plan.
I wanted to set up a Fall sensory bin for the kids so I went to the Dollar Tree and picked up some silk/plastic leaves, plastic acorns, small gourds and pumpkins and colored some rice orange and yellow.  I put it all together with some sparkly pumpkin stickers I already had (I stuck two together back to back) and we had our sensory bin.

We borrowed some of the materials out of our bin to do some craft projects.  I had already cut leaf shapes out of cardstock and we found many different ways to decorate them.
We used some of the acorns to do some “marble” painting. 

I was going to do this following the directions I often see where you put a piece of paper in a shallow box, add your paint covered marble and roll it around.  I had visions of paint covered acorns rolling around my living room so I decided to modify it slightly. 
I placed two acorns each in red, yellow, orange and brown paint.  I gave each kid an old peanut butter jar with a card stock leaf inside.  They were able to spoon the acorns into the jar, put on the lid and shake it around.  I still wound up with a paint-covered acorn rolling around the room due to a lid not tightened enough but it stayed much neater this way.  Of course, all the paints ended up mixed together for a nice brown hue.
Shake, shake, shake…

Our finished product.

We also painted some leaves with water colors.  I taped a few leaves to a larger piece of paper in order to make it easier.  I also wanted to see if they would make a nice stencil pattern when removed (they didn’t).  Once the leaves were done, Vicki wanted to continue painting so I left her to it and Georgie and I went on to other things.  One of her masterpieces:

They painted some leaves with regular tempura paints.  Georgie insisted he needed blue, in addition to the fall colors I provided, so I gave him one of our dabber painters.

We borrowed some of the leaves from our sensory bin and made them nice and sparkly.  The kids painted the leaves with some watered down glue, then placed them in a plastic container and…
shake, shake, shake….

and our finished product.

Since this wasn’t a unit I planned ahead, the only books we had were ones I already had here at home.   We read Molly’s Seasons by Ellen Kandoian and, always a favorite, The Magic School Bus.


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