P IS FOR PUMPKIN

~Punkin is 27 months old.~

I debated and debated about whether or not to keep going with our letter unit studies in ABC order or to mix it up. With it being Halloween and fall, I really wanted to do all the Pumpkin stuff now (and I wanted to be able to do E is for Egg at Easter, etc.). So I finally decided that she wouldn't know the difference really, and I sat down and planned out the year and when we'd do each remaining letter. Anyway, that is why we are now doing P is for Pumpkin, even though we just finished A, B, and C. We had such a fun week and I have gobs more stuff to do with Pumpkins, so instead of doing a second P theme next week like I've been doing with the other letters, I think we'll stick with our pumpkin theme again next week, too.

Theme: Pumpkin
Letter: Pp
Number: 4
Shape: Semicircle
Color: Orange
Verse: "Be patient with everyone" (1 Thes. 5:14)
Videos:

"That's How a Pumpkin Grows" song by Brian Vogan - This was her favorite this week

"Pumpkin Orange, Pumpkin White" - another song about pumpkins

Super Why Alpha Pumpkin Game - a video that teaches how to spell PUMPKIN

"Five Little Pumpkins" poem slideshow

Number 4 song by Big Bird
Books:

Punkin spent a lot of time in her little toddler recliner "reading" her Pumpkin books. Sometimes she'd choose to do this instead of doing her tot trays. She loved the books this week, mostly because she just really loves pumpkins.

Each morning during our Calendar / Circle Time, we read and acted out the "Five Little Pumpkins" poem. (I got the words and some cute printouts from Early Learning Activities.) We acted it out with motions and also with these little pumpkins I made from lacing beads with a small brown pipe cleaner stuck in the top hole. In these pictures she is setting the pumpkins on one at a time as we got to it in the poem, them "blowing" the pumpkins when it says, "Wooooo went the wind..." She also had fun "rolling them out of sight" under her chair or the desk.

TOT TRAYS

I found this pumpkin / ghost peg game at the Dollar Tree, and Punkin had fun just putting the pegs in and taking them out. She also counted how many ghosts and how many pumpkins.

I found this clever idea at Lil Mop Top. Punkin liked our Mr. Potato Head when we did it, but she wasn't as into this Mr. Pumpkin Head for some reason. (Hey, I had fun with it, though, when I'd try to get her to do it with me.)

I kept out the mini peg board since she liked it so much last week. (Plus, I got lazy and ran out of time to find one more new tot tray activity....) Once again, a big hit.

This mini sensory bin was the tot tray favorite of the week. I may have to make one for every color we do. (She loved the green one we did a couple weeks ago, too.) I just dump in a whole bunch of little orange things, and give her cups, spoons, tubes, trays, etc. to use with it. This time, she had orange pom poms, orange beads (craft beads and bigger lacing beads), orange buttons, orange macaroni, orange craft sticks, orange/white lima beans (I had these at school when I taught...one side I spray painted orange and we used them in math for "ghosts" and "pumpkins" manipulatives), orange foam shapes, and our small orange pumpkin buckets that I got at Walmart (6 for $2). I gave her the little pumpkin ice cube tray that I got at Dollar Tree, too, and she had fun filling each spot with something different from her bin.

We also had animal lacing cards and file folder games in our other two trays, but she wanted nothing to do with those. LOL.

TOT LEARNING ACTIVITES

I am finding that (most days) Punkin wants to do lots of "school" activities. She soaks it all in! Lately, we do vocab and Kumon, then I plan 2-3 review activities that we've done earlier in the week, then 3 or 4 new activities. I just keep going until I can tell she's "done" or until we run out of activities, whichever comes first. Many days I run out of planned activities before she is done. What a good problem to have!

We start off almost every "schooltime" with our letter of the week vocabulary cards that I made. (I finally got A-Z done, so you can print them HERE if you want.) We use these cards every morning during our calendar time. I have our letter of the week up in our pocket chart, and each day we add one more card of something that starts with that letter. After the two weeks of doing that letter, she goes through them all one last time, and then we put them in our vocabulary box. Then, for schooltime, we get out all the cards we've finished (right now A, B, C) and play games or do activities with them. (As we get more and more cards, we'll have to pick only a handful each day.) She really enjoys turning them upside down and then turning them over one by one, looking for her "astronaut" card. (For some reason that one is her favorite.) When I feel she is ready, I will have her group them by beginning sound / letter.

This week I noticed that once all the cards were turned over, she picked up and pretended to "eat" all the ones that were food. So, I thought I'd see how she would do with categorization. I asked her to hand me all the food cards first and we lined them up in a row. She did this with ease. Then, we did animal cards, which she pretty much did on her own. Then, I asked her to help me find all the things that "go" or move. This stumped her at first until I rephrased it as, "things that go vroom vroom." I was pleasantly surprised with her ability to do this, and it wasn't something I would have thought to start doing with her yet if she hadn't brought it to my attention with her wanting to "eat" all the food. :)

In place of our Kumon work one day, I decided to have Punkin try the Trick or Treat prewriting pages from 2 Teaching Mommies. They were just so cute! She did okay, but wasn't sure at first where to draw the lines to. (In her Kumon books so far, there has always been a "path" for her to follow.) She finally got the idea, but wasn't too excited about the whole thing. The pages with dotted lines for her to follow....yeah, um.... she just wanted to make straight lines across like on the other page instead of following the lines. Plus, I think the "curved" lines were a bit too advanced for her yet.

We started our week by looking in the pumpkin for things that start with the p sound and putting them on our big P cutout. (puppy, pillow, pen, pig, peas, plum, paper, pickle, pom pom, and pumpkin) We said the sound each time after she told me the item. "P is for puppy. /p/ /p/ /p/" She enjoyed this a lot. When she was done, she insisted on using the pen to draw on the paper.

She also did her P letter puzzles.

She sorted capital and lowercase Pp seed shapes into her little pumpkin buckets. This was a bit hard for her, since the lowercase and uppercase look almost the same. I tried to have her see that the lowercase ones had a "stick" at the top, but she didn't get it.

She sorted pumpkins by size with this activity from COAH. She got the "baby" ones okay, and most of the "daddy" ones, but the "mommies" threw her for a loop sometimes. I think for her level, the cutouts need to be much more distinct in size.

She hunted for the number 4 on her pumkins and used her Do-a-Dot to stamp them. Then, we tried tracing the number four at the bottom. LOL. She tried.

This was a HUGE turning point this week in her counting skills. (I had trouble getting pictures this day because she wasn't feeling 100% and insisted on sitting in my lap for school time.) I printed out the Trick or Treat Counting Cards from 2 Teaching Mommies and cut them apart. Then, I started with number one and gave her one card at a time and had her put one piece of orange macaroni on each trick-or-treater. Then, she took the macaroni off one by one and counted them as she put them in her orange cup. Surprisingly, she loved it, and she understood what to do, and it was the first time she really was able to stay counting on track as she put one at a time in the cup.

This was a last minute activity that I just kept getting more ideas to do with as we went along, so we just kept adding to it. Since I told her what a semicircle was a few weeks ago and pointed out that the moon looked like a semicircle that night, she has been obsessed with semicircles, so we worked on that shape this week. I had cut out three different sized orange circles and then cut them in half to make the semicircles. I was simply going to show her how two semicircles can make a circle when they are matched up. Then, I was going to have her match the semicircles by size to make 3 orange circles. She did well with that, and then I got this idea to glue the matched up circles onto green paper to make pumpkins.

Then, I quick grabbed my foam shape stickers, and picked out all the yellow ones. I had her pick out the shapes she wanted for each set of eyes, mouth, nose, etc. (She had to tell me the shapes by name as she picked them out.) Then, I had her put them on each pumpkin where she thought they should go. She got them pretty right on!

Then, on her own, she kept calling them Daddy, Mommy, and Punkin, so I labeled them for her, having her tell me each letter that I wrote. She was very proud of her Pumpkin Family.

Punkin also insisted on writing her own name on her paper, so we turned it over, and I gave her the marker and she said each letter of her name as she "wrote" it on her paper.

I saw this idea to make a shape car from Snails and Puppy Dog Tails. Since it used 3 semicircles, I thought it would be a cute idea to make this week, even though it wasn't pumpkin related. Punkin is really into "driving" things around right now, so I knew she'd love it. I told her what shape to pick up for me (the big blue semicircle, 1 small blue semicircle, etc.) and helped her glue it into place.

Her favorite part was driving the car around on the table when she was done.

We went around the house and found things that were orange to put in her orange pumpkin. She found a lot of things...even Daddy's tape measure (that he couldn't find later and wondered where he put it).

I cut out 2 sets of these Halloween matching cards from 2 Teaching Mommies and printed out one page that I didn't cut out. First, I had her just find the one that matched and set it on the correct picture on the grid. Then, we played a matching / memory game with the 2 sets of cards. I directed her quite a bit with which pictures she should turn over to aide in making matches, but she enjoyed flipping the cards over, and she was good about recognizing if they were "matches" or not.

STRUCTURED TIME WITH MOMMY

Punkin helped me mix red and yellow paint to make orange, then did a great job painting her paper plate. I only filled in a few spots on the very edges for her. Then, I gave her a spice jar filled with orange sugar sprinkles to sprinkle on the still wet paint.

When it dried, she glued on the face and stem.

As I'm sure a lot of other people did, I stole this idea pretty much exactly from Carisa at 1+1+1=1. It was just too cute. I taped down one big pumpkin and 6 little pumpkins in a paper box lid. Then, I put in the marbles (covered in red, yellow, orange, and brown paint) and let her roll them around. After I showed her how to gently slide the lid back and forth and side to side versus picking up the lid and shaking it, she did a great job. The marbles never came out once. (I don't know why I never did anything like this when I taught first grade. It was so easy, and they turned out cute!)

We made a Halloween "card" for Grandpa on the big one. (Forgot to take a picture.) I just glued a picture of Punkin on it and wrote "I will always be your little 'punkin.'" (He nicknamed me "Punkin" long ago when I was a kid, and was the one who nicknamed her "Little Punkin" from the time she was born.) Then I used the six little ones to make a garland for our mirror like Carisa did. I love the homemade decorations in our home this year!

Grandma babysat Punkin one day, and I had left a few things for them to do together if they had time. Grandma even did a good job of taking pictures for me! Punkin used an orange crayon, an orange marker, and an orange colored pencil to "color" the background of the pumpkin. Then, she glued on some orange macaroni.

They also painted a lowercase p together. This was Punkin's first time using watercolor paints.

They also made super easy (and very yummy) Pumpkin muffins together (using the recipe from HERE), but she didn't get any pictures of that.

This was our version of decorating a pumpkin together this year. I didn't have the energy to carve a pumpkin with her, and I didn't want to deal with the mess. Plus, she wouldn't have been able to do a lot of it anyway yet. So, we went this route. She didn't mind. She loved it!

In preparation for making pumpkin cut out cookies, I had Punkin go through our jumbo tub of cookie cutters and find all the pumpkin cookie cutters. (She found some other little circle cookie cutters, too, that she insisted on wearing as bracelets the rest of the day. LOL.)

And then we made sugar cookies and used the cookie cutters to make them into pumpkins. She really wanted to use the spatula to transfer them to the cookie sheet like I was, so I let her do a couple. Hilarious. Those didn't look like pumpkins (and one even landed on the floor), but that's okay. She was the most proud of those.

After her nap that day (or the two hours she stays in bed and plays and sings these days), I let her help me decorate the cookies. I did most of them, but let her do two on her own. They had lots of frosting and lots of sprinkles!

Eating one of her very own cookies! YUM!

STRUCTURED PLAY ACTIVITIES

She LOVED doing this "Poke the P" activity this week, and asked to do it over and over again. It kept her quiet and occupied when I needed to make lunch or dinner or do the laundry. (I always made sure I was close by, though, since it does involve push pins.)

This noodle pounding around the pumpkin was also a huge hit, and something she did quite a few times this week.

She really loves her sensory bins lately, and this was no exception. This fall bin has white and black beans, little green split peas, dry oatmeal, little gourds, and fake leaves.

Punkin and Grandma built this "house" together while I was gone. She even told me she put "The Three Little Bears" inside the house. (See them sitting with her pumpkins along the bottom?) LOL.

Anyway, that was our Pumpkin week. We'll be back next week with more pumpkins! To find more Tot School ideas, check out 1+1+1=1.