Fall Inside and Out

Back when I was still a little iffy on wholeheartedly welcoming fall to our neighborhood, we had the pleasure of enjoying a wonderful playdate with some great friends. This mother is so on top of it that she had this craft for our children to work on. We brought them home and the boys put them up in the kitchen. I've been looking at them every day since then and I 1-really think they're cute, 2-get to recall fond memories from our day together, and 3-credit them with softening my heart to the reality that fall is upon us regardless of how I feel about it, so it's best to just embrace it and make the most of it.


So that was how it started. Then I came across a few fall project ideas in a newsletter and we chose this as our next project.

Then, in a spontaneous decision, the boys and I put this tree up in the kitchen. It was another one of the ideas from the newsletter. It was a good one because we got to work on it and add to it over the course of several days. Phase one was the bare tree which is made simply by ripping a brown grocery bag into pieces, crumpling them up, smoothing them back out, and then taping them up and watching your tree take shape!

The following day was raining and wet outside, so we couldn't collect the leaves that I'd planned on adding for phase two. So instead I drew some leaf shapes and had the boys paint them and then (after they'd dried) let them cut them out and tape them up. Hence the tippy-top cluster of artificial leaves. :)

But since it didn't look that wonderful that way I skipped photographing it until a day or two later when we were able to collect, tape, and place the real leaves, phase three! Here's the finished product.

And here are the proud little boys who made it pictured with their work of art.

Lastly, from the same newsletter, came the leaf mosaics. I chose fall-colored construction paper, drew some (funny-looking) leaves on them, had the boys crunch up some of the dried leaves that we'd had left over from the tree project a day or two before, and glue them on to their leaf outline. The "L" was a last-minute inspiration I had to use the project for a letter lesson that Leaf starts with L and then we discussed the "L" sound and some additional L words. I would be even happier with it if I'd thought of that beforehand and had left enough room to write out the whole word "Leaf," but, what can you do? Oh well, I still thought it was a good idea and they had fun gluing on the felt L's anyway.

I have to admit that part of my motivation in doing all of these projects with the boys lately has been to experiment a little bit with adding some structured learning/project time into our days more regularly to get a feel for potentially making homeschooling part of our days in the future. I have to say that it's been quite positive. We've all really liked working on these things together and it seems like our days just go better and are much smoother overall on the days when we spend at least some time focused on a structured activity together. Not that we don't do things together normally, but it's usually a little more hit-or-miss. The boys have started looking forward to our project time and even ask in the morning if we can do a project and what it's going to be for that day. Anyway, I've been finding all of this quite encouraging. What do you think? Is this the right track to be on if we're moving in the homeschooling direction and/or considering it?