Fall is in the air!!

Crew Blog Hop ~ Bringing in the Sheaves!

Fall is my favorite time of year! When I taught preK, and even up until the past year or so with my kiddos, fall was my favorite teaching time!! Fall is the BEST time for unit studies!! Once you get past the beginning of the school year, the days are packed with learning.

 I always started the beginning of September with apples! So much you can do with apples. Start with a trip to the apple orchard and learn about the various types of apples. Once you get a big bag of them to take home, the possibilities are endless, cooking with them, painting with them, graphing, taste test - the list is truly endless. (don't believe me? Google apple lesson plans!)

From apples, we go to pumpkins. Same thing with all the pumpkin options... pumpkin patch field trip, pumpkin cooking (just search pinterest right now - FULL of pumpkin recipes), art with pumpkins and pumpkin seeds, various types of pumpkins and gourds!  IF you celebrate (well, celebrate is not really the right word - maybe take part?) If you take part in Halloween activities - there is another few days of stuff - carving the pumpkins, along with any other Halloween items that you want to learn about.

If you skip over the Halloween,  there are still a few things Halloween related that are not *scary*, but fallish - bats are fall, lots of things to learn about bats.  Scarecrows are a fun fall thing as well.  From pumpkins/Halloween, we next flow into fall leaves.  Lots of art activities with fall leaves, plus SCIENCE galore!!

From leaves, we go into Thanksgiving... I haven't gotten to that part of our planning and processing for this year yet, but I know that there are tons of learning activities for this as well!  The one thing that I do have down to do this year- Scholastic's virtual tour.  We watched some of this last year and it was pretty cool... plus they have tons of other things on their website for Thanksgiving!

Don't forget when you start planning, to hit the library - we always have a variety of related books spread out on the coffee table.  Even though the kiddos are older, I still put out some of the easy readers - mainly ones we own, I don't check out too many of those anymore!