Field trips in Portland, Oregon

While we have spent the past few weeks venturing around the Portland area, we took a complete hiatus from our normal schooling routine to spend time immersing our family in all the fun learning opportunities that the city has to offer.

We kicked off our adventures by a trip inside the city with a trip to Powell's book store to let our toddlers pick out a few books they would like for the time we are here. If you haven't visited this bookstore yet, it honestly is such a staple in this city and it's obvious why. There are literally floors and floors of books that you could end up spending an entire day exploring here. Our family has a deep love for books so it was exciting for our children to just spend the afternoon exploring and discovering new books to add to their collection. A big bonus for us homeschoolers is their large selection of workbooks and homeschooling materials!

Since we were already in the city it only made sense to make a complete day out of it and explore some of the other great things this city has to offer for families. It only made sense to take time for a little treat between the different activities we had planned by stopping in at an amazing artisan ice cream shop. You've probably heard of Salt and Straw here in Portland and I have to agree it was a must see for our family while we are here. Their flavors are such an out of this world combination that is sure to have you trying new things, you'd be surprised at the different flavors your toddlers will love.

After a quick refuel from the ice cream pit stop we made our way to visit OMSI. This was the first time we have actually visited as a family to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. If you are a homeschooling family like ours then be sure to take advantage of their $2 Sunday, the first Sunday of every month they have a special $2 admission day that makes this a very budget friendly experience for our family (we arrived early to avoid the crowds). Both of our toddlers enjoyed this museum, their special animation exhibits were a huge hit! Our entire family really gravitated to the human body exhibits that really covered every aspect of our bodies and how they work. Honestly, for only $6 for our family of 4 to explore OMSI, it was well worth it! I can see this being an activity that our children could grow into, once they are a little older they may enjoy certain exhibits even more.

If you have a younger toddler like our family then you can understand that certain activities only hold their attention for so long before they are running off to the next big thing. If that's the case for you then there are some great choices that are sure to hold their attention and they are both located within walking distance of each other! Whenever we find ourselves in Portland, we make sure to find time to make it up to the Portland Zoo and they offer a discount day on every second Tuesday of the month. For only $4 a person you are able to enjoy the zoo and all the exhibits they have to offer! This makes a very affordable field trip opportunity for our preschooler. There are so many options to enhance this fun visit as a large learning opportunity by supplementing zoo themed workbooks. We printed off a fun little workbook for our preschooler to fill with coloring and animal facts while we explored each animal exhibit (we will have more on this workbook later).

Just across the parking lot is another museum specifically tailored to young children, the Portland Children's Museum is really a must see if you have toddlers or preschoolers. A huge bonus to homeschooling families like ours that are on a budget is that this museum offers a free night! Yes, you read that right! Every first Friday of the month the children's museum has a free night thanks to Target for sponsoring it that gives everyone a chance to explore the entire museum and all the exhibits they have to offer. This had to be our families favorite stop during our trip and I honestly cannot say enough great things about this place. Everything is completely hands on and welcoming for young children to explore! There is a little bit of something for everyone here, a few of our favorites were:

The pet hospital and the grocery store were a big hit with both of our toddlers, offering a dramatic play opportunity to enjoy together. Each room was completely equipped with everything needed to make this dramatic play realistic for our toddlers. The grocery store even had little checkout stands that beeped each time you scanned an item.

The play it again theater was a HUGE hit with our preschooler and how could it not be? Give any preschooler a big stage and endless costume choices and you are sure to have a fun show provided. Our son really got into the pretend play and putting on shows for us. It was such a fun opportunity to see him really shine!

Lastly, our family really enjoyed the clay room together. I think we could of easily spent half the night in this exhibit just playing with clay and creating little masterpieces together. What toddler doesn't enjoy a fun opportunity to get messy and create things? It was hard to believe we got to enjoy the entire night at no cost at all, if you find yourself in the area it really is a must see!

 

 

Lastly, to just round out our entire trip we decided we really needed to get our toddlers out in nature and get away from all the hustle of the city life. As, many know we really enjoy hiking as a family and if you are in the Portland area it just makes sense to make a day trip to Multnomah Falls. This is such an amazing experience and offers different levels of hiking to fit with your own comfort levels. This can easily take up an entire afternoon of exploring so be sure to pack accordingly.

 

 

 

 

There are some hidden gems we are already excited to explore next time around ,but for this trip we were pleased to enjoy so much of Portland as a family while sticking within our budget. We can't wait to jump back into our normal homeschooling routine and get back to the fun learning with you all. Be sure to check up some of our fun upcoming activities as we navigate through the holiday seasons!



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)



.

 

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!