Day #14: Pumpkin Patch

We started our lesson by talking about the letter G. Then we moved into discussing gratitude, our value of the week. I used Janeen Brady's "Standin' Tall" book and CD on Gratitude. I have the series, so if any of you moms would like to borrow one for your lesson, let me know. Here is a link to the different values in the series in case you are interested.

The cutest part about the whole thing was that during snack time when I had the music from the Gratitude book playing, the kids heard the line "Having a gratitude attitude shows appreciation!" and each one of them turned to me and said thank you (for snack time.) Yay!


After we discussed gratitude, we transitioned into talking about pumpkins. We read a book that went through the life of a pumpkin. At the end of the book it talked about people choosing pumpkins at a pumpkin patch. I mentioned to them that we would all be visiting a real pumpkin patch tomorrow and they all got pretty excited.

We played with a felt board pumpkin. I had each child come up to the board and arrange the pumpkin the way they chose. After a lot of trial and error, the children came up with their favorite pumpkin face.






For snack time we had pumpkin pie, sliced apples, and graham crackers. Lucy and Mason did not want any pumpkin pie at first, but after they saw how much Ethan and Jack were enjoying their pie, they decided they wanted a slice also.


After snack time we had a stick puppet theater based on the story "The Halloween Pumpkin" by Pamela Oldfield. I couldn't find the book at any of the libraries, so I ended up making my own story and rhyme. Later, I heard the children chanting the rhyme I made up "I'm a mean old pumpkin, a mean old pumpkin, I like to scare you, a mean old pumpkin a mean old pumpkin, watch out! BOO!" I am going to try and attach the video of them running around trying to scare each other...

I read them a rather lengthy book in Spanish about the way pumpkins grow. Lucy and Mason were especially into it. On one page I opened where there is a field of green pumpkin leaves growing, Mason exclaimed "Beautiful!" We learned pumpkin in Spanish is calabaza and I taught them the expression "Que pasa calabaza?" We also reviewed anaranjado for orange.

We read another book of choice then had a pumpkin mask activity. I think they enjoyed making them, but they really seemed to enjoy having them to play with.