Thanks For Thanksgiving

I am so excited for Thanksgiving!

To help teach Miss Sassy about being grateful,

I decided to make a thankful tree.

I kinda hated cutting out leaves, so this time I decided that the leaves would be in the shape of a hand print.

We went to our school room and got to work.

It worked the best when I painted her hand, and pushed it down for her.  If there were any gaps or mess ups on the hand print, I painted them in.

(Aka, I cheated!)

Then she had free painting time.

I always try to let her have some freedom if we are doing something really specific.

I also suited baby H up before we even started and let him paint too.

I am trying to teach him limits.

He did pretty well.

Then when they dried we read the book

Thanks for Thanksgiving

by Julie Makers

I adore this book for Thanksgiving! The illustrations are awesome, and it gives kids a great jumping off place to think of the things they are thankful for. 

We wrote on our hands things we were thankful for.

Some were cute: Thanks for our legs...

Then we taped them up on the tree I made the day before.

Now every time we leave the house, we are reminded of all of our blessings!

Ladybugs and Leaves

We have loved learning about leaves!

Today we extended our learning.

We finger painted card stock leaves in a baggie.

It was fun and no mess!

The children tried to mix the yellow and red together,

And it turned out really pretty!

We read The Leaf Man By Lois Ehlert.

It is one of my favorite books for fall!

Then I gave the children some dried leaves,

And they made their own leaf people.

We read My "l" book by Moncure

Where a little boy finds things to put into his L sound box.

We made our own sound box and put things in that start with the letter L.

Next we learned about ladybugs

(to go with our letter L week)

And we made a ladybug snack.

Out of an apple, banana, Nutella in a icing bag, and chocolate chips.

With a toothpick to hold it together,

And pipe cleaners for cuteness.

The we reviewed the numbers 0-5 by using our ladybug counters,

Which I made by drawing on foam circles.

Then we worked on one on one correspondence

by putting spots on our ladybugs.

These were from my Kindergarten years,

Which I actually used for teaching addition.

I just bought some black pom-poms for the kids to count with.

We also made a ladybug counting sheet

By using the worksheet found here, and some dot markers.

They had to count out loud while using the dot marker

(FYI. I found this at All a Dollar but their called Bingo Markers.)

We finished up by read reading and acting out

Strega Nona by Tommie dePaola

Which has nothing to do with the letter of the week,

But went with our unit of places in the world and holidays.

(Strega was a witch.)

Leaves Are Falling All Around

Today we celebrated the remenants of Halloween,

Because how can you have so much fun one day,

and then forget about it the next?

Today we had heathy Halloween Snacks,

We had oranges that looked like jack-o-laterns,

Grapes dressed up like witches,

And banana ghosts.

Fall is in Full Swing!

And it's my turn for our preschool co-op.

We read Red Leaf, Yellow  Leaf.

By Lois Ehlert

We learned about the letter Ll today.

And dot painted Ll is for leaves page,

found here.

We also sorted some fresh leaves into colors.

It was so fun and so pretty!

Here are some other great books for this great autumn season:

Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert

Fresh Fall Leaves

by Shari Franco

Leaves! Leaves! Leaves
By Nancy Wallace


We're Going on a Leaf Hunt
By Steve Metzger