Pumpkin Patch Field Trip

October in Oregon just wouldn't be complete without a trip to our family's favorite pumpkin patch, we have a few we like to choose from each year. This year we thought it would be a fun to take our toddlers to Bauman Farm and make a whole day of it. If you have yet to have the chance to visit Bauman Farms you really should make a trip over and get the whole Oregon pumpkin patch experience in. This farm is really large enough to spend half a day or longer depending on the size of your group and we are excited to walk you through some of our personal favorites!

 

 

We like to kick off the day on the farm by visiting all the fun farm animals petting zoo that is filled with chickens, goats, bunnies, and other little furry critters that are sure to be a hit with the kids. This is a popular free attraction that you will see kids swarming to ,but if you time it right then you can get in when the crowds are dying down.

 

Another big hit with our toddlers this year were the hoppy horses which are just what they sound to be: big, blown up horses that you hop around on with your kids. It is a truly silly way to pass some time especially if you have a younger toddler who can't do everything your older kids may be able to do (that was our particular case this year). Be advised this is quite the workout to get these things bouncing especially with a toddler on your lap.

Another big hit and surprisingly big workout was the kids maze and kids zone, both are in covered areas so Oregon weather doesn't rain on your activities...literally. Both of these were a big hit with our preschooler! There are tube slides throughout that even us parents are able to slide on through! If you have younger toddlers like we do, there is also a little tykes zone that is a smaller version of the kids zone. This was especially a hit for our youngest daughter who couldn't join her brother in all the activities he was doing.

While we just didn't have it in us this year to wait in line for the bug train, which seems to be one of the biggest attractions on the farm itself. We did get to try out the giant pumpkin hill with sleds and it was just as fun! The kids loved this fast paced fun hill and it easily replaced our old favorite attraction.

Nothing else compares to traditional corn mazes in Autumn and while this particular farm has a few options like corn tunnels made from corn husks and a rope maze, nothing really compares to the big corn maze! This year was no exception of a great, twisting maze with even a giant tube slide in the middle of it. Honestly, a perfect hit with all of our family and our toddlers loved finding spare pieces of corn scattered throughout the maze. This maze led to the actual pumpkin patch itself, so this year we decided to save the hayrides for another pumpkin patch we plan on visiting this week when we go to pick out the kids pumpkins for Halloween.

There were so many options to supplement the day with not only fun activities ,but also to supplement our day with learning. Thanks to the size of Bauman Farm the options were really endless! Some of preschoolers true favorites were: apple tasting that was soon followed by apple cannons and learning what can happen to our favorite fruit when enough force is applied. Gem mining is also a big hit with our little guy! This activity can be a little on the pricey side of things ,but it truly is such a great learning moment. They get their very own bag of mining rough that they then pan in the mining stream to reveal their very own gems that they can then learn more about with the information panels and the volunteer working the booth. These were just a few of our personal favorites from this farm ,but we would love to hear about your own favorite pumpkin patches or farms that you have visited! We hope you are enjoying this week and can't wait to see you back for some more learning fun as we venture into the letter E!

Month 2, Week 1: All about the letter D

We have officially entered into our second month of homeschooling with our preschooler and have switched over to our new monthly themes of everything October. Wrapping up our first week of this month we learned all about the letter D, the colors orange and black, squares, and the number 2. By far this is my favorite month for themes, especially when it extends the holiday fun all month long for our two toddlers! Like our previous weeks we kick off with changing our whiteboard to reflect what we are focusing on for the week. To kick off the week we start with some workbooks all about learning, tracing, and writing our lowercase and uppercase D's. To tie in our letter D fun we tie in a letter of the week craft for both of our toddlers, you can catch ours from our previous year here. With this being our second month of home learning we decided it was a good time to break out of our normal schedule for the week and give our preschooler an activity filled week.

Instead of starting our week in our family room learning, we kicked off the week at the local indoor bounce center! This was just our way of getting out and getting active as a family and getting some of our never ending energy out for the day. One thing you will learn quick about our family is that we are huge advocates about using your community resources! There are so many options in our local community for our toddlers and even some specifically for our homeschooler, take advantage of these!

This week we jumped into our pumpkin theme with both feet and picked up some pumpkins to do our very own pumpkin exploring. Since neither of our toddlers are into actually touching pumpkin guts I found a great alternative: pumpkin exploration bags! It has a little bit of everything from inside the pumpkins for your toddlers to see without them having to get their hands dirty (a little side note: be sure to tape the tops, we learned the hard way by one of the bags exploding all over our youngest).

Since we had plenty of seeds and pumpkin puree from our pumpkins that we gutted and cooked, we decided to take the opportunity to have an impromptu cooking session with our preschooler for some pumpkin seeds and pumpkin cookies. Both of these recipes are easy enough to be a hands on experience for your toddlers. Just a little olive oil and salt or other seasonings and two extra little hands for mixing is all you really need for a great sensory learning and a great Fall snack.

As the week progressed we continued to fill our week with new materials revolving all around fun Halloween themes that you can find here. There are enough worksheets that we are able to implement them throughout our entire month of learning! Below you will see a fun pumpkin color recognizing sheet and a fun puzzle by numbers that I laminated for multiple uses. These were such a fun addition to our normal workbooks we use throughout the week.

 



We created some new hands on materials for this month of learning to give our preschooler a variety in his day to day learning. Below you will see a few of our own busy bags we created for quieter times during our learning days. All of these are at a level that our preschooler can do them independently and quietly when needed.

 Above are numbered pumpkins we found at our local dollar store with coordinating clothespins.

 Above are some lacing cards, some were printed, some from our local dollar store and another was from a box set.

Lastly, above are some leaves we collected on our nature walk with some small paper and crayons for leaf rubbings.

 

To wrap up our first week with our new learning themes, we made a fun gross motor game that both our toddlers could participate in. This is a spider web gross motor activity that I came across on Pinterest earlier and decided to give it a go. All you need is some painters tape, any color will do and some small Halloween type objects for your children to pick up. As you can see below, your spiderweb doesn't have to be perfect. Just make one with the space you have available and place some fun objects to pick up along the way. Then you have your preschooler start at one end and try to pick up the objects without stepping off the web. This helps really develop motor skills and gives us an activity to get us up and moving even when the weather isn't permitting.

 

 

We hope you enjoyed another week alongside us learning! We cannot wait to show you what we have in store for the upcoming weeks as we continue to explore these fun Halloween themes of pumpkins, spooky things, and all things October!





Month 1, week 3: All about C

We have just wrapped up another week of homeschooling and this week we learned all about the letter C, the colors red and green, the number one, and our community helper: police officers. Like every week I fill in our learning area's whiteboard with what we will be covering during the week, as you can see below. Like most weeks we kicked off ours with learning, tracing, and writing our lowercase and uppercase C's from our workbooks. Staying in theme with the letter C learning, we like to create a letter craft. You can find ours from our previous year here. Continuing in the fun letter learning our preschooler always requests that we do a word find. This week we drew a large letter C and filled it with any word we could think of that started with the letter C as an easy way to associate his world around him with this letter we are currently learning.

 

 

 

With this being our last week of learning this theme we wanted to finish out our apple learning strong with an "Apple of God's Eye" lesson. This was a fun way to kick off our week by creating our own paint, you can find the recipe we use here. Using this paint we sliced a few apples in half, dipped them in paint, and created our very own apple print cards. Inside our cards we wrote the verse:

"He shielded him and cared for him; he guarded him as the apple of his eye"  Deuteronomy 32:10. With Awanas starting up this week our preschooler gets to enjoy a night every week filled with learning Bible verses and spending time with other kids learning about our faith. This is such a fortunate activity our preschooler gets to take part in and really helps us at home with another opportunity to incorporate our faith into our everyday learning! You will hear me say quite often to really use the resources available in your communities to help you on this homeschooling journey!

 

Onto the rest of our week, this one was pretty special since we were wrapping up our learning theme of apples and still had a large amount leftover, we took the opportunity to take our learning to the kitchen by making some homemade applesauce. This is an easy, hands on activity that your preschooler can take charge of. We found our recipe here (we used a crock pot instead so that our preschooler could be in charge of every step). I love incorporating our toddlers help in the kitchen and giving them a chance to be involved in creating the food we enjoy eating here.

 

(This paint wasn't quite the consistency I was hoping for ,but our preschooler still enjoyed this activity)



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As the week progressed we really shifted our focus onto our community helper of the month: police officers. This is newly added to our curriculum ,but we loved the idea of learning each month about the people in our community and what they do. This ended up taking up the rest of our week because of all the fun activities we found to go along with this lesson plan. Initially, we introduced our community helper of this month by visiting our local library and picking up a book called "Police Hurrying! Helping! Saving!" This book was great at breaking down all the different things police officers really do! To go along with our book we decided to make our very own police officer badges by printing out an outline and letting our toddlers decorate them however they wanted. We also did a fun fingerprint activity by tracing our toddlers hands and using a stamp pad to make fingerprints. This was a great activity to show how different everyone can be with something as easy as different fingerprints.

 

 

 

Keeping in theme with learning about police officers we moved onto a great color sorting sensory game. We made our own traffic lights with some construction paper we had laying around, this was a simple activity and helped connect our shape of the month: circles to our everyday learning. I precut all the pieces and let our preschooler glue them together in order. Once our traffic lights were complete we used them as a guide to our color sorting bin, we used Lego's and pom poms that we had lying around our home as filler for our bin this time.

 

 What kind of homeschooling week would it be if we didn't incorporate a fun themed snack in, right? So, after some searching on Pinterest we came across some easy to make traffic light snacks! All you need are some graham crackers, peanut butter or really any spread of your choice, and some m&m's. It's as easy as it sounds too and a complete hit with both of our toddlers!

 

To wrap up our week we reviewed everything we had gone over this month from some pages in our workbooks and some flashcards we have laying around. We really wanted to reinforce the colors, letters, shape and number that we learned over the course of our first month back before we moved onto a whole new month and different theme. And like every week we made a special trip down to our local library to enjoy the circle time they put on for the kids in our community and to pick up some books of our own for our new learning themes. As for this week here are some of the books we really enjoyed:

 

 

 

We hope you had a great week learning alongside us! This upcoming week we are preparing to explore a whole new theme and get into celebrating all things October. Be sure to pop back in for some fun games, new sensory bins, and some fun local activities we like to enjoy every October!