Whole Child Development
Sink or float is a classic preschool activity. You gather an assortment of items and have the children guess which will sink or float, and then test their hypotheses. (It made me laugh not too long ago when David Letterman added a gag segment called “Will it Float” with a huge pool of water and random items for the members of the audience to make predictions about. I’m guessing he’d been to his little boy’s preschool the day he came up with that one!)
Children love to be sneaky….or sometimes just to think that they’re being sneaky. Here’s a play on a sneaky old guessing game that is perfect for a group of youngsters in the fall!
This is a variation of “Button, Button, Who Has the Button”. Have the children sit in a circle. Have one child stand in the center and close her eyes. Hand a mini pumpkin to one child and have him hide it behind his back. Have all the other children sneakily pretend to hide a pumpkin by putting their hands behind their backs also. When everyone’s ready, the child in the center opens her eyes and the whole group says, “Pumpkin, Pumpkin, Who Has the Pumpkin?” The center child guesses and if it’s an incorrect guess, that child lifts up his empty hands to show there was no pumpkin. At this point, you can have the center child just keep guessing, or you – or the child she chose- can give a clue about the person who does have the pumpkin. “A girl has the pumpkin,” or “This person has on a striped shirt.” It all depends on your group and whether or not they’re ready to give or use clues. Once the pumpkin is discovered, choose another person to be in the center and another to hide the pumpkin and start again. Try to give everyone a turn! And just enjoy playing together!
While exploring pumpkins with young children, you can’t miss the opportunity to examine the insides of these fascinating gourds as well as the outsides! Cut open a pumpkin and place it in your sensory table with scoops, spoons, tweezers, and magnifiers. Provide cups as well, for collecting the seeds. You can air dry them and use them to grow pumpkins next year! (Read more about saving seeds here. Pumpkins are really quite easy to grow if you have the space. Saving and reusing seeds also ties in very nicely with the book, Pumpkin Pumpkin by Jeanne Titherington.)
This is a well-known fingerplay that in 1998 was illustrated and put in book format by Dan Yaccarino. It’s a book little ones enjoy reading, especially once they are already familiar with the fingerplay and can essentially “read” the book independently. Whether you use the book or not, here’s the fingerplay!
Five little pumpkins, sitting on a gate (Five fingers on top of opposite hand. I usually explain the word “gate” the first time through. For the next five lines, show the number of fingers corresponding with the ordinal number and really play up the rest of the intention of the line with your facial expression.)
Children love good storytelling! When the storyteller engages them with facial and voice expression and tailors the story to the young audience, even the most boisterous young children can be found sitting with rapt attention! Listening to storytelling has much of the same benefits for young children as being read to. There isn’t the print corrolation, but there is tremendous building of language and listening skills and the concept of story structure. Here is a fun and engaging storytelling activity perfect for this time of year! You should practice it and get comfortable with it before “performing” for children. Let your own creativity take over and change it up any way you like to make it your own story! I actually heard this story as I was sitting in a library story time with my sons and tweaked it a bit to make it mine. I’m sure you could put your own spin on it and make it even better!
Runaway Pumpkin by Kevin Lewis, is relatively new, and completely new to me this year! It’s a delightful story about what happens when two mischievous boys start a giant pumpkin rolling down a hillside. One by one, family members envision delicious pumpkin treats, as the pumpkin continues on it’s destructive path. Finally, the pumpkin is stopped and well-used on a Halloween night. The text on the page seems to bounce right along with the pumpkin, a great feature for building phonological awareness. The children (OK, so did I) really get a kick out of seeing the whole family in their Halloween costumes!
Follow up this book by making a favorite pumpkin treat, like Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bread!
Have I mentioned yet that I really love Lois Ehlert’s books? Her collage-style illustrations are just so simplistically and realistically appealing. Particularly for fall, they really capture the vibrancy and texture of the season! In Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf, Lois Ehlert spotlights one of my favorite trees, Maple, as it is selected and planted while a seedling, then as it grows through every season, highlighting the narrator’s favorite season for the tree, fall! This book is great as a science focus, as well as for an art focus!
Afterward, have the children create their own colorful fall trees. First smock up! Once each child has a piece of paper on an art tray to work with, have each one take a brush, and with brown paint make the trunk and branches of their trees. Talk about the difference between the straight lines of the trunk and the curving, climbing, intertwining branches at the top. [Read more…]
If you are doing a study of apples, or on trees in general, you should really consider using the book, The Apple Pie Tree, by Zoe Hall. This wonderfully illustrated book follows a single apple tree, and the two girls who love it, through the seasons, until its fruit can finally be picked, chopped, and baked into a perfect apple pie. It is a great illustration of the cycle of seasons, as well as the process of making pie!
Understanding the cycle of seasons is a pretty obvious science objective, but learning to put things in an ordered series also builds cognitive and language skills that lay the foundation for reading and writing (beginning, middle, end) while also contributing to preschool math and problem-solving skills.
I once heard someone say that we have to be careful not to be in such a rush to give our children all the things we never had, that we forget to give them the things we did have. That saying comes to mind as I think about this old-school leaf rubbing activity. I don’t think I even need to give directions, do I? I hope you all had plenty of opportunities to make leaf rubbings as children! I just wanted to remind you to pass on that opportunity! Even today, in the age of the internet and wii, children light up as the leaf seems to magically appear on the page while they feverishly rub their crayons across the paper! This activity increases fine motor skills while also creating awareness of the texture and other characteristics of leaves (science). Combine this with other leaf activities that can be found at the fall favorites page! Enjoy childhood!
This is one of my favorite activities! Help your child take a leaf and place it between two strips of muslin or other white, cotton fabric. Together, hammer the muslin with a rubber mallet. As the mallet strikes the leaf, the chlorophyll is released from the leaf and absorbed by the fabric. Colored leaves in the fall work also as long as they have not become too dry (though their red and purple colors come from a type of sugar in the tree instead of chlorophyll. Check out this website for more science information about fall leaves.)
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