October 2021: Fall and Friendship!
Fall Exploration
Autumn is a beautiful time of year in Ogden, Utah!
We have be so lucky to have such great weather for playing outside, stunning fall colors, and lots of delicious fall produce. The children enjoyed many hours of outdoor play and picnicking this month. Gotta squeeze in all we can before the winter weather hits!
Around the school yard, we connected with Fall nature by collecting walnuts, playing in our sunflower fort, and going on a special fall walk with some of our SimpleLife families. As we walked we used our five senses to mindfully notice the signs of Autumn and we gathered nature items to bring back to the classroom where the children made festive fall wreaths in celebration of the season.
Monthly Mindful Focus:
Kindness and Friendship
The children spent all month focused on how to be a kind friend. The children are learning to use each other’s names, help each other, invite each other to play, talk together and of course play together! They especially have loved friendship building games such as “inclusive” musical chairs (who knew that 8 kids could find a way to sit together on one chair!). School is such a great place for children to learn to be mindful of each other as they are eager to form friendships. We feel like this school year has already produced so many sweet budding friendships. We can’t wait to see these relationships strengthen over the coming months together.
Trees & Leaves Exploration
It’s the perfect time of year to study trees and leaves!
Watching the large variety of trees here at preschool as they change colors has been magical! After observing them, we had each child choose a special “Sit Tree” that will be theirs all year. This is a special place they can go to for a break and connect with nature as they mindfully notice their tree growing and changing through the seasons. We plan to do activities with tour Sit Trees throughout the school year.
Our tree exploration included a lot of fun with leaves. We sang songs about autumn leaves falling down, made beautiful leaf rubbings, and had a ball raking, jumping and “swimming” in piles of fall leaves. We learned about the many parts of a tree as well as the seasonal cycles of trees. Trees even helped us with our mindful practice as we pretended our bodies were trees and did a mental Body Scan of ourselves from our roots to the tippy tops of our branches.
Art Exploration
Wire and Paper Mache Tree Sculptures
One of the art projects the children worked diligently on this month was their tree sculptures which took several weeks to complete. We started out by shaping our trees with wire on a platform, then added a special homemade paper mache clay to make the shapes of the roots, trunks, branches, leaves, and fruits. Finally we brought our sculptures to life by painting them with all sorts of whimsical colors. The children were excited and proud to finally get to take their trees home to display their hard work for their families.
Fall Celebration
Keepin’ it Simple and Festive!
The children helped prepare for the celebration by harvesting our school pumpkins and making leaf crowns to wear. On the day of our celebration many children came in costumes which they enjoyed showing off during show and tell and then paraded them around the neighborhood on our fall walk to the apple orchard.
At the little apple orchard we had superheroes, cowboys, princesses, cartoon characters and football players all picking fruit together. What fun! And we all got to enjoy the fruits of our labors by sipping on homemade fresh apple juice. Yum!
Lastly, our fall celebration was complete with a musical pumpkin walk which was made special because all of the pumpkins were grown right here in our backyard food forest. Miss Jenny even used some of the pumpkins to make the pumpkin muffins we enjoyed with our applejuice.
