Our beautiful cool mornings have helped extend our outside time each day. We've been focusing the last two weeks on preparing for our Apple Festival, so the kids have been felting shooting stars, sewing around their edges, peeling and chopping apples, and using a food mill to blend up the cooked apples. We've also had some extra sewing exercises which are great practice for pencil grip, especially among our older kids. The kids have enjoyed building their "ships" together as well, using the big blocks and bricks.
Inside, our stories have been focused on the apple harvest season. Last week, I told a story of Old Gnome, which was based on our apple finger play. He reaches and reaches for the apples but "one little apple hanging up so high, it fell down and bumped his eye!" There are several little rhymes like this until one apple "rolled and rolled nearly to his house, and there it was discovered by a funny little mouse..." Our story this week has been about Mother Earth, who plants a seed in her garden. The seed grows into a tree and tries to stretch all the way to the stars, but to it's disappointment, cannot reach them and must remain planted to the earth. But apples grow all over and when Mother Earth one day gathers all the apples, she cuts one open and shows the tree that all this time, it's been carrying stars all over it's branches, and each "star" is a house for little apple tree seed babies. The children LOVE this part, so next time you cut into an apple,
"Take an apple big and red
Don't cut down, cut through instead
Open it up and you will see
A star inside for you and me!"
"Take an apple big and red
Don't cut down, cut through instead
Open it up and you will see
A star inside for you and me!"
Because we have such avid storytellers, I've made some little "treasure boxes" which have some fun props for stories inside. It's a great way to let kids play with those little doodads that they love without having them everywhere. So our boxes will contain a silk, perhaps some toy animals or wooden people, little pumpkins or gourds, and some shiny stones, etc. The kids love making their own stories with these.
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