It’s finally fall! And it even feels like it! From now until Christmas, it feels like every couple weeks I am doing a season/Holiday themes story time. I always do a general fall theme sometimes before Halloween, so this week was it!
I am up to 8 kiddos! We had a couple turn 4 this fall so I have a bigger group that I’ve had since August. I was thrilled!
We read two books about fall, because I planned two crafts so I wanted to make sure we had ample time for everything.
The books were:
- The Roll Away Pumpkin By Junia Wonders and Daniela Volpari
- Fall Mixed Up by Bob Raczka
Both of these books are so cute but Fall Mixed Up is one of my all time favorites. It is full of a bunch of goofy mismatched fall things, for example “Apples turn orange, pumpkins turn red, leaves float up into blue skies overhead”. It reinforces the normality of fall experiences for the kids to say “no apples are red!” and so on. Some of them are a little goofier, but they are all good! My favorite page says that the neighbors gave them stuffing and turkey for Halloween. I always ask the kids if they’ve ever gotten mashed potatoes on Halloween and they all yell NO! It’s so much fun!
I found two crafts that I thought would be fun and fall-y so we did two today!
The first one was a leaf suncatcher craft! I used my Cricut Crafting Machine to cut out the outlines of the leaves, and then we stuck them to contact paper, then set it sticky side up. The kids were able to choose colors of tissue paper for their leaves, and stick them to the contact paper. Once they were all done, we put another layer of contact paper on top, sticky side down. We trimmed the excess, punched a hole and tied on the yarn! I held my example up to the window so they could see the light shining through, and after they were finished several of them went to the window to see theirs like that too. They are so precious. Here is a picture of my example:
And here are some pictures of the kiddos doing this craft:
After this craft we did a color mixing craft with pumpkins. Again, I had my Cricut cut out the pumpkins for me. That thing is amazing!
This is a no-mess craft and the kids had a lot of fun with it! You put the pumpkin in a plastic bag (I put a piece of paper under each pumpkin too so the paint would only be on one side of the bag), put a few dollops of paint on the pumpkin, seal the bag and boom! The kids can press on the bag and mix the paint around. It was perfect!
We put yellow and red and some orange on their pumpkins so they could mix it around. We talked briefly about how mixing yellow and red makes orange and then we proved it with our pumpkins!
Here are some photos of them doing the craft:
The only thing that I didn’t love about this craft was that the paper was pretty stuck to the top of the bag where the paint was. On a few of them, removing the pumpkin ripped off some of the paint on their pumpkin, so that was a bummer!
Here are their finished projects!
Miss Meg's Library 