Fall is here!!!

We were one of the fortunate ones to receive the Autumn Treasures unit for free from Amanda Bennett's Facebook Party a few months ago. 

 

So we spent the last few weeks going through this unit kind of slowly.  I know it's not supposed to take that long, but we stretched it out over 3 weeks.  It was fun to take it slow.

 

We learned about why we get the season of Autumn and why leaves change.  I don't have pictures, but Lydia was the sun and we revolved around her in the living room with our globe so they could see the tilt of the earth change.  It was a fun activity.  They could see that certain parts of the earth were closer to the sun at different times.  So that is why we get cooler temps and the leaves start falling off the trees.  Joey calls this "hibernation" or sleeping trees...lol.  However he needs to remember.

We talked about Johnny Appleseed and the anatomy of apples. 

We did some Johnny Appleseed activities.

For our American Girl Club we are reading Felicity and in Book 2, Felicity's mother shows her the Apple star.  So we talked about this and looked for stars in our apples.

We made apple butter (and fried doughnuts) for our Indiana unit study...but it tied into our fall/apple study too.

We talked about Migration, Hibernation, and Adaptation.  I found this great unit at Montessori Print Shop.  And instead of just printing them for one child, we used them to make posters.  I printed a set for each child.  The Viking Wilderness show covered all 3 topics, and so did an episode of Cat in the Hat Knows Alot About That.

And of course we talked about pumpkins.

We looked at the anatomy of the pumpkin.

Lydia and Caty wanted to try pumpkin without cooking it.  You can see from her expression that she didn't like the taste.

And then we put it on the grill and cooked it.

We toasted the seeds with sea salt and Lydia said they tasted like popcorn.

And they made a pumpkin pie custard (no crust).

I have had this pumpking weaving mat activity for a couple year, it got lost on the shelf.  So we pulled it out.

Same with this leaf scratching.  The kids really enjoyed doing this while we talked about seed dispersal in the fall and we watched the Cat in the Hat knows A lot About That episode on seeds.



Then they ate their pumpkin pie...everyone loved it!

We also learned about squirrels.  The difference between squirrels and chipmunks. 

They each made a squirrel.  I gave them the pieces they needed and the picture it should look like. Even Caty enjoyed doing this.  I found the squirrel here.

We did the unit study a bit different.  Our kids do not enjoy worksheets and filling out pages, so I opted in the middle of this study to just use books to read about the items we were learning about and find science programs and hands-on projects to learn more.  It worked out pretty good.

We also decorated our house for fall.  The brown paper was packing from an Amazon order I had saved in our supply closet.  Pulled it out and hung it on the front door (We have a closed in porch), and drew a tree outline.  The kids used silk leaves I got on clearance last year at Rite Aid for 10 cents a pack to decorate and then colored the trunk.  I added the scarecrow....he's just cute!

We put out our littel scarecrow with our pumpkins on the ladder out front. 

That was our trip through Autumn Treasures.  A little science and a lot of fun.  Watch in December as we travel through the Winter Wonders Download N Go.

Next up for Science is Human Body!