Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf

I know it’s November, but it’s only just starting to look like Autumn outside! Since we have a couple of weeks before the next round of holidays, we’ll be focusing on some Fall books and activities. We’ve had ‘Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf’ by Lois Ehlert from the library a couple of times and enjoyed it – especially peeking at each other through the leaf cutouts in the book! This week, we’re also reading ‘Leaf Man’ by the same author and a few other books we found at the library too.

Anytime Activity

This week, Munchkin can make scenes and pictures with the printouts from 3dinosaurs.com’s Fall Barrier Game. We haven’t played this as a game, I just printed and laminated one set of pieces to make pictures. Munchkin has been enthralled by this, and has been carrying the scarecrow and old lady around the house with her, telling them all kinds of things, and having them play along with other activities. We’ve made a few nice scenes with the characters flying, leaves falling down, and piling everything on at once!

Sensory Bin

In the bin this week:
– popcorn kernels
– felt leaves
– spiky balls
– pine cones
– wood rounds from tree trimming
– apple ornament
– fall coloured large buttons
– scoop and spoon
– blanket to set out and play on

Perhaps taking a week off from the bin was a good idea! Munchkin has been really into it the last few days. She likes scooping the popcorn out onto the blanket, piling it on the wood rounds, standing in it, playing with the spiky balls, and getting the scarecrow and old lady from the scenes involved.

Tot Trays

Autumn Leaf Stamping

I found some leaf stamps in my stash of old things, and set them up on a tray for Munchkin with a pad of paper. She picked her sheet, and went to work!

Tissue Paper Fall Tree

This tray contained a tree trunk printout, tissue paper in red, yellow and orange, and a little dish for glue. Munchkin had a good time ripping tissue paper, scrunching it, dipping the paper into the glue and sticking the leaves down. She even put some leaves under the tree – though I think that was my interpretation. She has a thing about covering up all the text at the bottom of pages where someone has typed “created by…”

Counting Practice

It’s been a while since we’ve worked on counting. I picked these cute leaves up in the dollar aisle at Target, and they are perfect for counters. We worked on this tray a few times, and in each case, Munchkin wanted to count through card #6.

Cutting Practice

This was one of many trays that contained a printable from 3dinosaurs.com’s Fall Tot Pack. Munchkin can pretty confidently cut across these all by herself, holding the paper by herself. She cut through all the strips in quick succession. She does prefer cutting the picture to cutting the cut line though!

Fall Dot Markers

More printables from 3dinosaurs.com! I also tried printing a page with images of large and small leaves, where the instructions state to dot the small leaves. I told Munchkin what to do, and we picked out small leaves with our fingers – she totally knew what to do – but then with the marker she went ahead and stamped wherever she liked, giggling all the way through it! Ah well.

Fall Matching Cards

And more printables from 3dinosaurs.com! These are always a hit! Since three of the leaves were the same shape, just a different colour, this actually provided a slight challenge for Munchkin, the first time through. She wanted to put the brown leaf on top of the orange square, even though she’d already matched the orange leaf. Good challenge!

Button Sorting

I had this little box of buttons that perfectly matched some felt leaves I also had, so I pulled one leaf of each colour and set them up for button matching. Munchkin like this. This first time she mostly wanted to play with the buttons and put them in and out of their container, but in later passes at this tray she actually sorted quite a few buttons, until the little leaves were full. It also helped that her pal, Barnacle, got involved and did some sorting too!

Fall Roll and Graph

And more printables from 3dinosaurs.com! This is probably the third or fourth time we’ve tried this activity now – and it’s been a few weeks. We completed it over two sessions. I had some cute Fall stickers to stick in the boxes. I think Munchkin understands the process of this task, but it’s a lot of concentration for a two year old, so breaking it into a couple of sessions, as needed, seems to work well for us. When our leaf pile image was the first to hit 5 rolls, she used up the rest of the stickers on regular paper. She had owls and mice balancing on pumpkins, and foxes eating acorns!

Leaf Printing

We also filled a plate with dollops of paint and pressed in a big leaf Munchkin picked up at school. I didn’t get any pictures of this, but it soon turned into fingerpainting!

I think that’s everything! It felt like we did a lot of different things this week.