Pumpkin Exploration Station

As you can see pumpkins are a big part of our calendar this month.  Each day Eva checks the pattern to see whether it will be a leaf day or a pumpkin day.  After putting the date on we sing our days of the week song and then do our poem of the month using the big stuffed pumpkin:

Pumpkin, pumpkin big and round

I'm glad you grow upon the ground

For if you grew up in a tree

You might fall and land on me! 

(the stuffed pumpkin bonks us on the head at the end- giggles all around!)

The sensory tub has been made a little spookier, filled with black beans; black and orange yarn pom poms; black, green, purple and orange sparkly pom poms and Halloween erasers.

This game allows Eva to practice her fine motor skills by pinching pom poms with tongs and placing them in a pumpkin ice cube tray.  She also gets to make patterns with the colors.

Using a bunch of plastic pumpkins, Eva is able to sort them according to size.  This is a favorite already!

Finally, I made a letter matching game by writing upper case and lower case letters on pumpkins left over from the calendar.  I also found stickers of things that start with the letters.

Eva has to find the letters that go together and the picture that starts with the letter.

She did great with it and when Daddy came down from work, she dragged him over to play it again with her.

Hello September

It's hard to believe that it is September already!  Where did the summer go?  We had a wonderful and quite hot season so it's nice to welcome the cooler temperatures and all the great things that September brings.  Eva got to have her first bonfire last night.  She loved it but got a little upset that we couldn't just "turn it off" when she was done sitting by it.  September also brings the beginning of the new school year in our neck of the woods so we've started doing some school-like things here in the lounge.  The main thing we have begun is learning about calendars.  There is so much that can be incorporated into calendar time- counting, days of the week, months of the year, patterns, letter recognition and so on.  I made our calendar using another big frame (the same kind I used for the felt board).  I drew the calendar right on the glass using paint markers and then stuck velcro in each square to hold the numbers.

For September we have apples and I will change out the numbers each month.  I can put different colored papers in the frame to change the background too.  Eva loves it and is so excited to add a new number each day.  Patterns have been tricky for her but seeing the color pattern grow as we add to the month has been helping a lot.
I also decided to do a monthly sensory tub instead of weekly ones (they were getting hard to maintain and a month gives Eva more time to really delve into them).  Our September one has lots of fun fall items- pinecones, acorns, various silk leaves (I bought a bag of 100 plus a garland that I broke apart at the dollar store) and some fall colored pom poms.

There is also a rake (one of Eva's garden tools) for her to rake the leaves with.

If you want to see a really awesome fall sensory tub, go check out Mari-Ann's at Counting Coconuts- she went all out!  I definitely plan on getting some apples to add to Eva's later in the month.