I LOVE FALL!

(My little has been having fun raking leaves with their Crayola Rainbow Rake!  LOL)

One fun thing that I have done through our homeschooling years is to occasionally wake the kids up and surprise them with a one day celebration of a holiday I have made up.  We have done board game day, pumpkin day, apple day, middle ages day, etc.  Last Thursday we celebrated Leaf Day!  We have all been pretty excited to be living in a place with fall foilage after 4 years in the desert.  So I really wanted to spend one day just enjoying the beauty and splendor of Fall!

Our day started out with some handprint leaves.

These will go in my preschoolers ABC Lap-n-Note we are making this year.

I love anything that can be made with the kid hands!  And these were easy.

We just painted a mix of fall colors on their hands and then pressed their hands on the paper. Once it was dry I used a Sharpie to draw a few veins and a stem.  So pretty!

While our handprint leaves dried we headed out to the park to go leaf hunting!

(If you are reading this via email you can view the slideshow HERE.)

After we came back home we used our leaves we collected to do leaf rubbings.
My littles thought it was SO fun that they got to peel the paper off the crayons and color with the side of it!  LOL

Then I printed out a couple of leaf coloring sheets for the littles to color. 

We used one from a E-Book we have that is very similar to this one:
http://gonewengland.about.com/library/coloring/nleafcollage1.htm
and we used this one:
http://www.homeschoolshare.com/documents/fall_leaves.pdf

Once they had all the leaves colored we cut them out and then pasted them onto a piece of folded construction paper.  Then we cut them out again leaving the fold uncut so we could hang them on a piece of yarn. 

Here is a close up of the garland we made.

And here is what it looks like stretched across the fireplace.

We also read about the parts of leaves and the parts of trees.  I printed out some leaf related worksheets and handwriting sheets for my daughter that she can work on in the upcoming days.

I was also planning on making Aut-yum  Leaves,  but I couldn't find a leaf cookie cutter.  So we will have to make these another time.

We are working on one more leaf craft that involves the pictures we took at the park of all the leaves.  We will hopefully have that project done later in the week to show you.

My kids really enjoy these special days.  For one thing it is a break from the "normal" school day.  But, also it is just a great family time to enjoy time learning together.  This is a fun way to do a little mini-study of something I want them to learn about, but don't necessarily want to devote a lot of time to.

Happy Homeschooling,

Jamin 

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Comments

Posted by Anonymous

How fun!!

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Posted by Jessy

Thanks for sharing! Although leaves are LONG gone from the trees (and our yard) now, winter and snow is just "around the corner". A Snow Day with snow books and videos, snow painting, sledding, shoveling, building a snowman, and making homemade ice cream would be fun! LOL

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Posted by bubbebobbie

Just came by to congratulate you on your nominations, yes that is is grammatically correct! You Rock!
Actually according to this post you Leave.
Either way, Congrats!
Because of Jesus, Bobbie

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Posted by Denbin

we loved doing this..my 5yod to be and my 3yod daughetr..Thanks for sharing.Infact I blogged about it today.

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Posted by kkocher

I just had to tell you that your email on Monday came at the perfect time. I was hosting my FIAR COOP and I had only one hands on activity planned. Then I saw your leaf hand-prints and and I was off to Michael's for paint. I couldn't tell what kind of paint you had used but I did my best. Since we were reading The Rag Coat and it was set in the fall and spoke about all the fall colors I just new it would be a great addition to our COOP. I was right! The mom's all loved the idea and the kids LOVED the cold gooey paint on their hands! I gave you all the credit and even brought the mom's into my office to show them your pictures! LOL Thank you so much for always sharing your wonderful ideas....know that they are greatly appreciated and copied often! ROFL

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