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!