This year I wanted an easier pumpkin decoration than carving as my little one (almost 3) would love to work with the knife to crave and cut, however, I wouldn’t want her to.
As the girls love tattoos I though it would be great to apply some tattoos on pumpkins. Finding spooky spider tattoos for pumpkins in the Flying Tiger shop was real lucky.
The girls started the decoration with washing and drying their own pumpkins.
In the tattoo set there were some shiny crystal-like stickers and silver/black paint pens. Of course, we needed to try them all.
Finally, E. found her pumpkin a little too over decorated but I loved her drawings and creative patterns. Her pumpkin even said Hello 🙂 it was a great crafty Halloween activity that both my 6- and almost 3-year-old could actively take part in.
Autumn’s all about colours. This colour-matching activity has stuck into my mind and I’ve been planning to make it for years. Very easy even if you can’t really sew like me.
What you need:
coloured felt (brown, red, orange, yellow, green
buttons (of the same colours)
thread and needle
scissors
marker
How you can create it:
First draw your hand around on the brown felt sheet and cut it out. This will be the tree
Sew the button on the finger tips and thumb
Draw a simple leaf on different coloured felt and cut them out. You can decorate them with the marker (draw the veins)
Fold the leaves half vertically and cut a hole in the middle.
How to play:
Give your child the leaves and the tree-hand. Their task is to button the leaves up on the tree branches. They need to match the right leaf to the right button.
This activity is great for kindergarteners who need practice doing up their buttons a lot.
In the meantime you can identify colours, talk about movements how to push the button through the hole.
Little L had a harder time at the beginning and needed some help with the first 2 leaves. But after that she did it all by herself.
Autumn has arrived and the weather has changed. E. is busy with identifying different forms of clouds and predicting the weather. Little L. started to get interested in the weather board that we haven’t used for several months. So our new topic for the time being is weather.
E. has been reading 3 new weather related books lately:
Clouds have had a great effect on her. She’s been examining the clouds as soon as we get outside.
I saw an excellent activity concerning clouds on pinayhomeschooler.com and I’ve been waiting to do it with E. The time has come.
I took out some cotton balls, pillow filler, some gray and black markers. We needed a blue surface/background serving as the sky.
I chose it to be light blue felt sheets (except for mine as we had only 2 and Little L wanted to join in. So mine is a black construction paper sheet.)
We had a look at the book Clouds by Anne Rockwell and checked the clouds from the top layer downward and made them out of the cotton balls or the pillow filler (The latter is not the best option for making it grey but much better for the fluffy, thin clouds)
Little L. lost interest quite quickly after the 2nd type of clouds and started to play with the cotton balls, then went to the toy kitchen. When she started to feel bored I asked her to got and play with Daddy as she began destroying our clouds. She said: – I’m not playing with you. – sulkily and added: – I go play with Daddy.
E. was reading the descriptions from the book (you can watch a video of her reading out loud) and we made the clouds accordingly (pulled them out to make them long if they were stratus clouds and make them round and puffy if they were cumulus clouds.)
For me it was extremely challenging as I had not had any memories of cloud types from my studies and I couldn’t make a difference among the many kinds of clouds. Even when we finished I wasn’t able tell which is which apart from 2 or 3. Well. E could…
At the very end of this activity E. collected all the cotton balls and pillow filler and played the so-called “cotton ball bag” game. She was throwing the bag of cotton balls into the air and either her or Little L. caught it. They laughed lot.
As I’m desperate to find native nannies for the girls, I’m willing to put up with the fact that some of them can stay only for a short while. Like in case of our Canadian nanny, C, who could stay with us only for 2 months.
Still, the girls and C had a really good time together full of fun and enjoyment.
I always try to separate the girls English time while C was here but it’s more and more difficult to keep Little L away from E. or any fun activity. So most of the time they played together.
When not, E. showed C. her flag puzzle. C. knew a lot about flags so they both enjoyed playing together with it.
Little L. took pleasure in C reading for her.
However, Little L. joined in with the building…
… the playdoh time,
E.’s playdoh bird in the nest
or the tunnel game.
C. was showing pictures of her travels and the kids were fascinated by the exotic places she had been to. She told them stories about her experiences abroad.
They also loved making the sofa into a slide and slipping-sliding on it. What a pity I didn’t take a photo of that.
The girls got on well with C. from the very beginning, they had no communication problems whatsoever. They had lots of fun in English.
It’s such a pity she had to go back to Canada at the end of summer. I wish she could have stay with us longer.
The girls are still crazy about Paw Patrol and I wanted to make some activities for my 2-and-a half-year old, because the earlier Paw Patrol activity that E. got for her 4th birthday is too challenging for her. So here (at the end of this post) you can download your free copy of the activities.
A Sunday morning when we were all free, I gave Little L. (2,5) the activity pack and she got really excited. She wanted to open all the activities but I decided to hand them one by one instead to avoid mixing up and confusion.
Of course, Big Sister (6) joined in. She also finds these games fun although these tasks were too easy for her.
The first game Little L. picked was roll and count. I wasn’t sure what the counter should be as Little L. is often more fascinated by the counter than the activity itself. Finally, I picked some colourful buttons, but the counters can be anything, from beans to beads, or even little bone shaped manipulatives if you find them. (I couldn’t get them).
Then Little L. chose the puzzles. Her favourite character is Everest so she put her together first.
Then came the others. She was commenting like: – This is Rubble. Rubble is on the double. etc. (Of course, when I wanted to record it she didn’t say a thing.)
The third activity was sizesorting. What did she start with? Yes, with Everest. Her interest lasted up to 5 characters. Good job, Love!
She also wanted to try the pre-writing sheets. She was a pro at it. I was really amazed how well she could do it. Maybe I should have made more challenging pre-writing pages for her.
She also enjoyed the card matching activity. She’s not really into memory games but the time will come and then I’ll cut up the board part too.
“Rocky”
Finally came the cutting practice. She LOVES cutting (I remember the time when E was in this phase and she was cutting all day. Somehow I have a deja vu feeling).
After all this she got tired and lost interest, so we stopped playing with the pack. At another time we’ll do the colouring sheets and the patterning task. I think she had lots of fun. It’s enough to have a look at her sweet face, not to mention how much she chattered during the activities.
What we left out is also fun: colouring the pups and the patterning activity. (The reason why she didn’t choose these ones at the beginning is that she doesn’t like them. Colouring is not her favourite activity (E. got to like colouring around the age of 4-4.5) and patterning is a little too difficult for her.
Non-native Mommy 