The kids had been bringing in all kinds of little treasures they had been finding in nature. I never asked them to...they naturally wanted to bring nature inside and investigate it more!
We collected all their treasures to look closer and to practice sorting objects by attribute like scientists do!
They used black ink pens and Sharpies to document what they noticed as they looked closer.
We read “Leaf Man” by Lois Ehlert and then made our own! I laminated these leaves six years ago and they are still going strong!
Here was an area where they could use loose parts to create oral stories and use them to inspire stories to write later!
We went on a field trip to the farm where we fed animals, went on a hayride, played and each got our own pumpkins!
We brought our pumpkins back and measured, weighed, and put them in buckets of water to see it they could float. We documented our observations and then painted them.
I had a few pumpkins so I put them out for them to explore...
...but then, a local farmer donated a few pumpkins since Halloween was over. 😂 This picture doesn’t even show all of them!
We had so many, our Kindness Ninjas decided to deliver a baby pumpkin to each student in the upstairs kindergarten hallway to brighten their day!
I now could use all kinds of pumpkins in our learning areas! I created these invitations to explore:
An area to look closer and document as scientists.
An area to measure height, circumference, and weight as mathematicians.
Here they can explore the concepts of heavier and lighter with a balance scale.
They were fascinated by all of the gourds!
After reading “The Ugly Pumpkin” the kids took gourds to their tables and wrote stories with their gourd as a main character.
We have had a lot of learning experiences so far with all things Fall! Next week we will open a bunch of the pumpkins and gourds up and see what we discover!
