Family Pumpkin Fun!

Is it too late to talk about pumpkins? 

We love this time of year! This time before Advent but after Summer when the weather is nearly perfect and the days are just long enough... it has always felt to me like the focus is really on family from late September to early November. Maybe it's because celebrating Halloween is such a big event in my family, maybe it's because we homeschool and by the end of September we've really hit our stride, maybe it's just the smell of pumpkin spice in the air.

Whatever it is, Mother Goose Time wiggled it's way into our family fun at the pumpkin patch this year! As most of you know, we have been blogging with Mother Goose Time in exchange for receiving their school bus box of fun each month. Opening our October box revealed a surprise: Mother Goose Time provides special holiday activity plans & supplies for celebrating & educating at the same time.

Every year, we take our children to a local farm, Bush-n-Vine in York, and let them participate in all things pumpkin for the day (including choosing their own "perfect pumpkins" from the patch).  

This year, Noah trekked all over the patch hunting down a small, perfectly round, dark orange pumpkin (that's how he described the perfect pumpkin). 

The kids also had fun playing in the tunnel slide, bouncing in the inflatables, and swinging. Their favorite part, as always, was the hay ride out to the patch! Although, this year's new addition: a sand-box style corn crib with buckets and shovels was a big hit too!

This year, we followed up our pumpkin hunting festivities with a game & a craft from Mother Goose Time.  As the kids shredded orange construction paper to fill their paper bag "pumpkins," we discussed what they thought was inside our real pumpkins. 

[Later, as we carved our largest pumpkin, the kids got to explore real pumpkin insides.]

In this way, Noah and Ada Grace got a touch of science mixed with art & family fun together. In the end, they were so proud of their paper pumpkins that each earned a spot on the porch steps!

It can be hard to find games to play as a family that entertain our almost five year old without being too challenging for our two year old to participate. Thankfully, Mother Goose time to the rescue again with Pin the Patch on the Scarecrow game. We played three times! We all laughed as we took turns covering our eyes and attempting to "pin" patch cutouts to our scarecrow poster. Even Noah, my perfectionist child, laughed out loud after he mistakenly pinned a patch to the scarecrow's nose!

Finally, we ended the night by carving a giant pumpkin together with grandparents and baking the seeds with our favorite seasoning (we like season salt or old bay on our pumpkin seeds).  Noah chose the design (can you guess what it is?) and Ada Grace got totally grossed out by the pumpkin "guts," but she cheered us on as we cleaned out our pumpkin. Finally, both kids proudly watched from the porch as we lit our Jack-o-lantern for the first time. 

It was a wonderful family celebration! All three generations: the kids, my husband and I, and "MeMaw" and "PapPap" had fun together learning and celebrating. 

Learning about Lily Pads with Little Goose

This morning, while the kids were finishing their breakfast, I started setting up a fun math activity from Mother Goose Time. By the time they were done with their eggs, I was ready to teach them about lily pads, logic, and scientific reasoning. 
We receive our Mother Goose Time curriculum and the Little Goose teacher guide supplement for free in exchange for sharing our journey on the blog. Today I'd love to share our adapted Little Goose lesson about lily pads.

I got creative with our first activity and decided to put them in the bath tub. The children immediately jumped in for Floating Lily Pads, an activity that promises to build scientific reasoning skills and listening comprehension.
I gave each child a paper plate "lily pad" to float in the water. Then, I gave them water beads, small rocks, and plastic blocks. Here's a picture of our "supplies."

The children were encouraged to explore using the different items to sink their lily pads. We talked about which objects are heavy (rocks) and which are light (water beads). They also explored numbers as we discussed how many blocks or rocks were needed to sink a lily pad. The answer is 4 rocks just in case you were wondering.
[I wish I had more pictures of this fun activity, but it so happens that when you show my children a bath tub... they immediately take off all their clothes and hop in!]

Next, we dried off and went to the table for a fun visual art Make & Play activity where we practiced fine motor skills by making our own lotus flowers.  I explained to the children that lily pads are actually lotus flower leaves and asked them to use the tools they had been given (paper plates, cupcake liners, markers, crayons, and glue sticks) to make their own lotus flowers resting on lily pads.
Ada Grace did a great job manipulating the glue and crayons. She kept repeating "Green! Green!" as she colored. Noah thought carefully about how he wanted to stack and glue his cupcake liners and the result was really cute.

Then, I showed the children their new My Little Journals for November. The Little Goose guide suggested the children draw lily pads on the cover and focus on making circles and counting them. Instead, my kids insisted on drawing their own versions of a rainforest with lots of shades of green.
I brought back the focus by having them count out loud with me while they worked.
Finally, we finished our little goose day with Wiggle & Giggle (a song about the layers of the rainforest) and Cuddle & Snuggle. My kids always have a great time dancing to the Mother Goose Time songs. Today, they especially enjoyed snuggling with me to say the letters of their name and get extra cuddles. With a new baby on the way, these little moments cuddled together are precious to me and my babies.

Jaguars in the Rainforest

The kids were really excited to start another month of homeschooling. Noah was most excited about our new calendar. The kids get to glue a new number to the calendar each day and it's a favorite for Noah. Our calendar, like many of our new great manipulative tools and crafts come from Mother Goose Time.

We are receiving Mother Goose Time curriculum free in exchange for sharing our journey here on the blog. Having a completely organized curriculum that is "ready to go" has been a life saver for me while I navigate my first year teaching different ages & being pregnant.

The Mother Goose theme for November is Rainforest Adventure.  The first day's lesson focuses on an animal from the forest floor layer of the rainforest: the jaguar. My kiddos love all things animals, so it was a great place for them to start. 

Here's what we learned about jaguars...

1. Community Challenge with a focus in Life Sceince & Social Relationships:

Where would you sleep if your home was destroyed? That certainly gave the kids pause. After a moment Noah said "outside!" and the girls immediately copied him. We talked about where jaguars sleep and how they have become endangered as a result of deforestation. 

The kids had fun showing me how they thing jaguars move, sound, and sleep!

2. Make & Play with a focus in Creative Art, Gross Motor Skills, and Literacy:

This was definitely Ada Grace's favorite activity of the day! She loves learning about the alphabet and quickly committed J is for Jaguar to memory. 

We spent extra time talking about the shape and colors of jaguar spots. 

These were so cute that I quickly decided to add them to the children's portfolios when they finished "playing" with their new art.

3. Wiggle & Giggle:

We all listened to the Jaguar Crawl song on our Dance n Beats cd while the children crawled around the yard pretending to be growling jaguars before dissolving into giggles. 

It was adorable to watch and a great way to burn off any extra energy before nap time for the little girls.

4. Small Group Literacy with a focus in Emergent Writing:

I admit, I tweaked this activity a bit. While the children were participating in the Wiggle & Giggle song, I hid their name tags in our bushes (a pretend rainforest!) and they got to explore the rainforest searching for their names. 

It was a bit like hide and seek. My kids love hide and seek!

What's In the School Bus Box?

School Bus Box

I've been told I possess a lot of patience. When it comes to opening our monthly curriculum box from Mother Goose Time, it's certainly true!
We receive Mother Goose Time curriculum and the Little Goose adapted companion free each month in exchange for our thoughts about the lessons here on the blog. The box, affectionately referred to as "the school bus box" by my children & husband, arrives about a week before each new month begins.
From the moment we get our box, my kids are ready to open it.  I'm usually forced to hide it. [I prefer that we finish the previous month before they get too excited about the next theme.]

This November, I decided to let everyone peek into the new box with us and see first hand some of the great things Mother Goose Time includes in our monthly curriculum subscription.  Here we go! ...

Teacher Tool Bag, Thanksgiving Kit, and Free Gift

Mother Goose Time really knows the way to a homeschool mama's heart: organization! All the components of our curriculum are organized and split into clear plastic bags.
[I know, I know... not exactly the most Earth friendly solution, but we do reuse our bags as much as possible to cut down on waste.]
The Teacher Tool Bag contains a separate teacher guide book/planner for each week.

Each month we also receive a free gift. November's Free Gift is a wooden goose stamper.

November (like our October box) contains an extra bag for a special holiday celebration of Thanksgiving complete with a teacher guide, games, themed snack suggestions, songs, and finger plays.

Up next is the Mother Goose Time Theme Web.  This nifty poster goes on our wall to help the children (and me!) keep track of all the things we're learning this month. With each day focusing on a different subtopic, it's easy to lose track of how everything is related. This poster helps the kids see how all the things we learn are related in a way that's easy for them to understand.

November Theme Web

November Activity Calendar

Mother Goose Time also includes an activity calendar that I was initially very excited about, but I've found we don't use it much in our home based setting. It is a nice way for me to check that we are covering each skill area on a regular basis though. I also think part of the reason I get less use of the activity calendar is because we mostly focus on the adapted activities in our Little Goose Teacher Guide which aren't always listed on this calendar.
However, I think in a more formal classroom setting this calendar would be a great informational poster for parents to see in advance just what their children are learning on any given day.

Finally, I unpacked one of the daily lesson bags so you can see just what's included in each day with Mother Goose Time.  Lesson 1 of November's rain forest theme includes tactile letters, a letter poster, Make & Play craft, a themed "create-your-own" classroom calendar, letter poster, name tags for each student, a family newsletter for the month, and My Creative Mind parent hand outs about the daily craft & lesson for children to take home. Since we homeschool, our family newsletters & My Creative Mind papers are included in our portfolios.

The last image shows the Mother Goose Time teacher guide pages for Lesson 1.  This guide helps me set up for the day, teach the lesson, and track our children's progress along the way. Like everything else with Mother Goose Time, it's well organized and easy to use.