My new camera!

I told my husband last night that I was pretty depressed about how few pictures I've taken of Giddy's first year.  My camera broke right after we moved here 5 months ago and since then I've only been able to take a few pictures on my phone or borrow Ashton's camera.  Dan was really nice and took me to Best Buy last night to get one!  Wow...digital cameras have really come down in price.  I was thankful we were able to get a good deal on one.  It was really windy and cold outside today, but we wanted to get out of the house and let the kids "air out".  I took along my new camera to take some pictures.  Here they are!

And here's Mr. Landon engineering something fun after we got back.  It's a sling shot and apparently the little legos fly the best with it.  His older brothers were quite impressed and excited about this recent invention.  Later I came upstairs to find he had completely taken apart (with a small screwdriver) a large calculator in his bed. 

Getting ready for the packers.

Today has been kind of crazy.  Weeks ago I started preparing for the movers to come and pack us out.  I've been decluttering and organizing in hopes that unpacking on the other end will be easier.  Box after box has left the house to be donated and we've done less school than usual as I have been going through everything.  It has reminded me that when we get set up in HI I really need to make it a priority to go through each room on a regular basis to clean out trash, unused items and straiten up behind things.  It would have made things a lot easier this time! 

Right now we're considering mailing all the summer clothes (for when we get to Hawaii) to my parents house so that when we get there before moving we can switch out the suitcases...summer for winter clothes.  I don't want to have to take it all on the plane with us to Chicago.  There are just so many logistics to be worked out. 

Mostly I'm stressed about making sure the movers do not move things we will still need here for the next month.  It's hard to figure out how to separate things out.  I've started putting some things in a closet that will stay.  I guess I'll put a sign on that closet saying not to pack anything inside.  I'm wondering if we should pack suitcases for what we'll use here and put a sign on those, too?  I'd planned on just leaving things hung up in the closet for us to use and taking out things I wanted to be packed, but then the hangers won't get moved and we're going to have so many clothes here to get rid of before we move.  We have a lot of winter clothes!!  I'm still trying to decide if I should get rid of them or put them in permanent storage for when we get back to the mainland.  We would like to stay in HI for awhile, but who knows if that will happen! 

I'm off to pack and organize again! 

Preschool Leaves Unit

I need to do better at blogging right after I do these units!  I forget soooo much.  Thank goodness for the binders that I keep for the girls with their projects in them.  Since I don't remember what day we did what I'll just list the projects we did and some of the books we used.  We used a lot more books than these, but these are the ones I remember (and probably the best ones).

Books we enjoyed during our leaves unit.



I loved this book!  It talked about different kinds of leaves and showed drawing of them.  We read this every day and now the girls can find oak, maple and gingko leaves outside and name them!

Leaf Man
This book was really interesting.  I loved how the author was able to make cows and chickens out of leaves!  We tried making some leaf animals of our own outside using this book as inspiration.

This book was way above the girls' level.  I had bought it on Amazon so I read it to them anyways and had the boys listen, too.  I learned a lot and was able to explain to the girls on their level about why leaves change color.  They may have picked up a lot from the book, too...who knows what all they absorb while listening? 
This is a cute story that we already had in our home library. 


Activities

• Started each school day by singing, "Autumn Leaves are Falling Down" to the tune of  London Bridges Falling Down.  I found it on a video on youtube here.  

• Leaf Rubbings.  We were able to do leaf rubbing and them write the type of leaf next to it.  
• L is for Leaf coloring page.  We used one that had lots of L's for writing practice, but google has about a million different options
• Leaf collecting.  We collected a few different types of leaves in our yard, taped them to a piece of paper and wrote their name next to it.  
• Sponge painting on a tree trunk made by their girls' arms.  This sounds confusing and you can see Thea's in the above picture.  Our girls didn't get as into it as I thought they would.  In general, preschools prefer open ended art...something like this is fun, but only keeps their attention for a few minutes.  
• We raked leaves into a pile and jumped into them.  We acted this out inside first.  
• Each day we looked outside and observed the changing colors of the leaves.  We also noted how many more leaves seemed to have fallen since the day before.  Even now, 3 weeks later, the girls show me leaves that have changed color and pick up leaves to show me.  "Look, Mama!  A maple leaf!"  Even Mareea knows that.  On the way into church Sunday she HAD to have a maple leaf, an oak leaf and a ginkgo leaf to hold onto.  It made us laugh that she had to have one of each.  I love that she really learned something!  
• We FINALLY learned what the huge trees out front are!  By observing their seeds/nuts and leaves we did some research online and figured out that they are Beech trees.  So now we know what Beech leaves look like also.  

On Friday we had a "fall party" to celebrate Autumn and our leaf week.  I think the big boys were expecting more of a "party", but the girls were just excited to have activities to do and good food to eat.
We made mosaic leaves,

Made "happy fall" posters to hang up,

and baked and decorated fall cupcakes (banana bread muffins).