31 Days of Reading with Your Children // Day 4

Today I want to share a fun reading + project that we did this past Friday. One thing I love to do with my girls is read through the seasons with them. This idea was not original to me ... one of my favorite homeschooling blogs is written by a mom that is passionate about nature and the changing of the seasons. When I first started reading her site, if she listed a book in a post, I added it to our library list and over time built up a favorite autumn reading list for our family. At the end of this post, I'll share some of our favorites with you.

On Fridays afternoons, we get together with another homeschooling family for what we call Friday Fun School. : ) (Catchy title, right?) The purpose of our gathering is really for our little girls - we have two kindergarteners and one pre-K girl and wanted to do a specific activity related to a book with them a la Five in a Row. You can click here to read more about Five in a Row and this method of homeschooling using children's books. I did this with my first kindergartener and am now "rowing" books with our second. We also have a 10, 8, 8, 3, 22 month and 11 month old that participate on Friday as they can and want to ... typically everyone but the two babies are involved.



Our book that we read this past week was Fletcher and the Falling Leaves by Julia Rawlinson. This is the sweet story of Fletcher the fox and what happens to his favorite tree as the weather turns from summer to fall. Little Fletcher loves his tree, but one morning he wakes up and notices the leaves on his tree are starting get dry and crinkly sounding. He starts to get worried.



Is his tree sick? Then the leaves start falling off his tree! He tries to help them stay back on the tree, but they keep falling off.



The other animals don't seem concerned at all. Pretty soon the tree is completely bare except for one leaf and then, even that one, flies away in the autumn winds. Poor Fletcher is so sad.



However, when he wakes the next morning, a magical transformations has happened - he sees that his sad, bare tree is now beautiful and shimmery with thousands of icicles! Fletcher is so happy for his tree because it is even more beautiful than before.


To go along with our story, the little girls and boy made a falling leaves craft.

Source: busybeekidscrafts.com via Stephanie on Pinterest

Using the template from the website linked above, we cut out our background and colored it. Then we cut hundreds (nay, thousands!) of little yellow, orange, and red leaves and glued them to the tops of our trees.



Behind the template, a sandwich baggie is attached and filled with some of our leaves, and when you shake it, they float up and down like falling leaves.
 


Some of our other favorites for this time of year are:

• Autumn Story by Jill Barklem
• Four Friends in Autumn by Tomie dePaola
• Strega Nona's Harvest by Tomie dePaola
• Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf by Lois Ehlert
• Pumpkin Jack by Will Hubbell
• The Ox-Cart Man by Donald Hall
• Johnny Appleseed by Steven Kellogg
• Cranberry Thanksgiving by Wendy and Harry Devlin
• How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World by Marjorie Priceman
• Hello, Harvest Moon by Ralph Fletcher

Do you have a favorite autumn story or two that I need to add to my list? Do share!

Happy Autumn! : )

Day: 1 // 2 // 3
The book links above are Amazon affiliate links ... if you click them and make a purchase, I will earn a few pennies towards books for my munchkins. Just thought I'd mention it. :)

Friday Fun School // Week 1

As part of our schooling adventures this year, we have planned for an "unschooling" fun Friday every week. We go to Bible study in the morning and then spend our afternoons with our friends, the B family, doing some sort of activity, whether it is a craft project, outdoor adventure, or service project.

This week was our first Friday Fun School, and although the two mamas were about to keel over from exhaustion when it was done, it went great. Thanks to a couple of great ideas from some of my favorite crafty blogs, we were prepared, the kids had a ball, and no one was hurt in the making of this craft. : )

First, we started with our craft. I hit up one of my FAVORITE craft blogs (and just for all round photography and color and mama inspiration) Whatever. Meg posted a very cool butterfly canvas craft several months ago and we decided that would be the perfect project to kick of our Friday activities. For those that are interested, we had seven kids tackling this project and they all thoroughly enjoyed it - we had five girls (ages 10, 7, 5, 5 and 4) and two boys (8 and 3). (We also had two little boys, 20 months and 11 months, who were taking naps during this time). Busy!

I brought in Travis' laptop so that I could show them what our end result was supposed to look like.



I even dug out my not glamorous industrial apron from Sam's in case I got hit with a random paint brush somewhere during the event.



Next up: painting our watercolor paper with bold strokes and bright colors. Then we let this dry so that we could eventually punch our butterflies out from it. My tip: spend the extra dollars and buy the watercolor paper. I was so glad I did. It gives your butterflies a little extra bit of texture to them and the color from the paint stays so much better.



Note our bold and bright painting shirts. : )





After putting our watercolor paper aside to dry, the kids each picked out a color of acrylic paint and painted their canvas. (No pictures of that). Then, as our watercolors and canvases began to dry, we began punching out butterflies and gluing them on.



I thought all our used, punched out watercolor trash was pretty. : )



While we were waiting for things to dry, we snacked. Cake batter blondies. Super easy, super good. Another of our little plans for our Friday school is to have the kids take turns making the snacks (reading the recipe, following the directions, etc.) and this recipe is perfect for that.



The finished products:



This was a big project for our first Friday. I don't know that every week will be as complicated, but for kicking off our year, it was perfect. And, I know how three original works of art hanging in our dining room. : )