Fall Archives - JDaniel4s Mom

Five Little Crows Preschool Games, Songs and Craft

September 29, 2014 By Deirdre

In the fall my family visits several farms. We go to one to pick apples and another to find pumpkins to display on our porch. We usually see scarecrows and crows cutouts on the farm. Scarecrow games and crafts have been featured on the blog before, but we haven’t done preschool games, songs and a craft featuring crows. I thought it was about time.

After some searching I found two songs or rhymes that could be used to practice choral reading (reading together) or play preschool games. Actually they could be used with older children too.

Songs and Rhymes for Preschool Games

Five Little Black Crows

Five little black crows
By the old barn door,
One flew home
And then there were four.

Four little black crows
By the old oak tree
One flew home
And then there were three.

Three little black crows
With nothing to do
One flew home
And then there were two.

Two little black crows
Out in the sun
One flew home
And then there was one.

One little black crow all alone
Through the day
He ate in the fields.

5 BLACK AND SHINY CROWS
(To the tune of 3 green and speckled frogs)

5 black and shiny crows — Sat on a scarecrow’s nose,
Eating the most delicious corn: YUM, YUM
Scarecrow, he shouted BOO! — 1 crow, away she flew,
Then there were 4 black shiny crows: CAW! CAW!

Preschool Games and a Craft

Crafting Crows

While you could sing or chanted the crow verses above on their own , I thought it would be fun to have some crows to use along with them. Our set of five little crows were super easy to make!

Materials:

2 Paper towel tubes cut in half ( You could use five toilet paper tubes instead.)
Black construction paper
Yellow construction paper
White construction paper
Scissors
Glue stick

Directions:

Cut the paper towel tubes in half. We ended up with six paper towel tube sections that were about 5 1/2 inches long.

Cut black construction paper into a rectangles that are about 5 1/2 inches tall and 6 inches long. Glue them onto each cardboard tube.

Cut out black wings for each crow. Then cut out five black triangles. Make a row of several vertical cuts in the wide base of each triangle to give your crow a feathery fringe for the top of their heads.

Glue the wings and the fringe onto your crow.

Next cut out a set of five white circles and black circles for your crows eyes. When you have them just right, you can glue them on your crows.

Finally cut out yellow beaks for each crow and glue them in place. We chose to cutout flat triangles. You could cutout diamond shapes. The diamond shapes could be folded in half. The bottom half could be glue to the crow and the top half could be folded down. This will give you a beak that can open and close.

Preschool Games

You can use the five little crows craft while you are singing or chanting the song. Here are some other preschool games or ways you can use them.

Retelling Game- Have children take turns using the crows as puppets to retell what happened to the crows.
Add a Verse- Have the children use the crows to create a new verse to the chant or song .
Counting Backwards- Children can say or sing the song starting the opposite direction. The Five Black Shiny Crows can start at one and crows can fly in one at time. You can say, “In she flew!” or “In they flew!” In this version the crows wouldn’t be afraid of the scarecrow. The chant can easily be said reversing the number of crows without changing the words.

For more cardboard tube activities you can check out my Tube Crafts board on Pinterest.
Follow JDaniel4’s Mom’s board Toilet Paper Tube Crafts on Pinterest.

I bet you can come up with more preschool games with the crows. If you have one you would like to share, please share it in a comment below.

Craft for Kids- Paper Bag Scarecrow

September 26, 2014 By Deirdre

Scarecrows remind me of fall. They protect fall crops like corn and pumpkins as they start growing toward adulthood and toward fall. My son and I have seen them at every orchard and patch we have visited to get apples or pumpkins. Why not make a stuffed paper bag scarecrow craft I thought as fall started this week. It could be set up on its own or glued to a piece of construction paper. He would be our reminder of fall.

A paper lunch bag was decorated with a scarecrow’s face using crayons, construction paper and a bit of orange foam. The face that was created was long and took up much of the paper bag. There was only a small section left to cut slits into. If you want to have longer slits in the neck of your scarecrow, you will want to glue the facial features closer together.

The scarecrow’s head was stuffed with shredded paper to made the head three dimensional. ( We recently received a package that was filled with red shredded paper.) If you prefer a flat head, you can totally skip this step.

When the paper and been shifted around and was where it needed to be, the bag was tied shut with twine. I seriously thought about using bright orange ribbon instead. Ribbon would make it too fancy so, I shifted the idea of using twine.

The finished scarecrow head is sitting up in our kitchen hutch. As I mentioned earlier you could glue the paper bag scarecrow to a piece of paper. You could also place I stick or wooden spoon into the head to create a puppet.

Scarecrow Books

I love tying books to crafts. Below you will find a number of really wonderful books about scarecrows that you could read before creating a paper bag scarecrow or after. You could always read a couple of them before you worked on your fall craft and a couple after it was done.

The Little Scarecrow Boy by Margaret Wise Brown tells the tale of a young scarecrow who feels he is more than ready to scare crows. His father tells him to stay home and practice making scary faces, but he sneaks out. When the young scarecrow is able to do what his father didn’t think that he wasn’t ready for. Boy! His dad is proud of him.

Scarecrow by Cyntia Rylant shares just what a scarecrow’s life is like from his perspective. The book has soft and soothing words along with wonderful pictures.

The Scarecrow’s Hat by Ken Brown points out that if you really want something you may have to trade and trade again to get it. A chicken who wants a scarecrow’s hat spends a whole book trading until he can get it.

Barn Dance! By Bill Martin Junior is an old favorite of mine. A young boy sneaks to the barn when he hears a noise. When he looks inside he finds a rollicking barn dance going on. I love the rhythm and flow of this book.

The Lonely Scarecrow By Tim Preston shows how a fall of snow on a scary scarecrow gives him the opportunity to show the animals how kind he is. This is really sweet book. ( Here some activities we have done with The Lonely Scarecrow in the past.)

The Scarecrow’s Dance By Jane Yolen is about a scarecrow who tires of his job and decides to dance and romp in the fields. As he nears the farmhouse, he hears a boy praying for the corn about to be harvested and decides his job guarding the field isn’t done.

Do you have favorite fall book or craft?

Fun Crafts- Fall Painting Projects for Kids

September 20, 2014 By Deirdre

I scoured last week’s The Sunday Showcase as well as the archives of The Sunday Showcase to find some fun crafts that featured fall painting projects. While many of the fun crafts I selected feature trees and leaves, there are several other fall themes shared. You are going to just love all of them and are probably going to want to try each of them with your children.

After looking through this week’s featured posts, please take a moment to add a few of your own posts. I would love to see that activities and crafts you are doing at your house or in your classroom. Adding two or three posts will help us see the great things you are doing.

Fun Crafts

I just love this take on paint by numbers from Mom Inspired Life. What a great way to work on number recognition!

We have done corn painting at my house just has Enchanted Homeschooling Mom did, but I love how she took it outside. The giant paper canvas was such a great idea.

This pine cone apple craft from Fireflies and Mud Pies is simply wonderful. I would love a whole row on them on my mantle.

Painting the caps of acorns transformed them into acorn jewels. What a fun idea from Dabbling Momma!

If you love marble painting, you are going to love apple painting. This idea from Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas uses the same painting technique to create fun crafts that can be cut into apples.

Painting or drawing with crayons on wax paper is the first step in creating this melted crayon leaves and apple craft from Life with Moore Babies.

A fall tree hand banner looks like it would be one of those fun crafts that you will love making and displaying. It can be found on a post on Enchanted Homeschooling Mom’s blog.

Corks are such a great painting tool. Teaching Mama used them to create the leaves in this wonderfully fun craft with a fall theme.

This apple tie tree is filled with fun crafts created by Teaching 2 and 3 year olds. Her tree is based on one she saw on Teach Preschool. (She mentions that in her post.) I love that she did these fun crafts after reading the book The Apple Pie Tree.

The Sunday Showcase is hosted on the following blogs:

JDaniel4′s Mom

Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas

Here Come the Girls

Inspiration Laboratories

We each feature different posts that have linked up, so be sure to check everyone out! We’ll also be pinning our favorites to our Pinterest board.

If you are here for the first time please read this informational post on Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas’ site for the full details. Anything kid friendly and/or child centered is welcome! You are welcome to share more than one post, but we don’t accept links for giveaways, shops, ordownloads for purchase, etc. They will be deleted.

An InLinkz Link-up

Fall Activities for Young Readers and $500 Giveaway

September 19, 2014 By Deirdre

Fall is in the air and learning is happening everywhere. It is the perfect to time look through this amazing collection of fall activities for young readers and pick out your favorites. I have searched high and low to find a wide variety of reading activities that will be good to try with your children one-on one, in small groups or in centers. They activities have been organized by theme. Under each theme I arranged them by the specific skill they work on. There are over 50 ideas in this round up.

Take your time and enjoy each one.After you have selected some to visit, I hope you will enter the $500 Giveaway shared at the end of this post.

Fall Activities- Apples

Word Families

Popsicle vowel worms slide through paper apples to build words in the wonderful post from Toddler Approved.

I have an apple and worm slide activity too. My worms change the initial letter of a word.

An apple word family tree activity was created by Learn.Play.Imagine. What fun!

Snippets by Sarah has a number of free printable that work on word families. They are awesome.

Word Recognition (Sight Words)

What fun it would be to build words on a CVC tree just like Life Over C’s!

An apple memory game is shared in the post from The Educator’s Spin On Thing

Fall Activities- Leaves and Plants

Letter Recognition

Pre-K Pages has a several fall activities shared in this post.

I love the leaf letter fishing.Leafy Letter learning can be found in this post from Teach Mama.

Letters appear out of nowhere in this fun post from Buggy and Buddy.

No Time for Flashcards has a felt leaf letter match. What a great way to learn with textured leaves!

This fall leaf alphabet movement activity from Toddler Approved has kids hunting and gather leaf letters.

Word Recognition (Sight Words)

The Educator’s Spin on Things has created a fun sight word jar filled with words and acorns. It wild be fun collecting the materials needed for this fall activity.

1st Grade Sight Words Building Leaf Words

We have built sight words with leaf letters here on JDaniel4’s Mom.

Word Families

Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas has created all word families trees that will be will be fun to create and explore. That is two fall activities in one!

Playdough to Plato created a fall paint chip word family tree that looks really cool!

Story Retelling

Kindergarten Works has a fun literacy center set up for the retelling of the book Fresh Fall Leaves.

Story Exploration

Have you seen any of the books created by Kids Yoga Stories? She has a wonderful fall-themed book that is such fun to explore.

Planting a Rainbow followed by actual planting is shared in a post by Wildflower Ramblings.

There is Just One Mommy sharing the book Hello, Squirrels, and some really fun story extensions. I also love the leaf activities she did to go with the book A Friend for All Seasons.

Win one of FOUR $500 cash prizes directly in your PayPal account! This giveaway is open internationally. You must be 18+ years old to enter. Void where prohibited. No purchase is necessary. Winners will be notified via email and have 48 hours to respond before another winner is chosen. Please see the detailed terms and conditions below the giveaway for more info.

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Fall Art Activities for Kids

September 13, 2014 By Deirdre

fall-art-activities-for-kids

Fall art activities for kids have started to appear on The Sunday Showcase. I found a number of them as I scrolled through the link up during the last week. Theywere awesomely fun and creative! Your children are going to love working on them.

If you have any fall art activities you would like to share in the link up or a wonderful child focused posts on another topic, please add it to the link up below.

Fall Art Activities for Kids

Fall art activities for kids

Teaching 2 and 3 Year Olds walks you through how to create gorgeous fall water color leaves. Some wonderful fall books are also shared in this post. What a wonderful way to welcome fall these will be!

Taking a walk to look for fall colors in the great outdoors and recording what you find in pictures is a wonderful fall art project. Kitchen Counter Chronicles shares more about this wonderful idea for a fall craft in a post called Going on a Colour Hunt with Kids.

Buggy and Buddy shared a wonderful fall crafted paper owl and guessing game they have called Who’s Who? Owl Craft for Kids. I know at least one child that is going to love crafting and playing this owl activity.

Children can craft their own fall garlands using the instructions found in Mosswood Connections Felt Garland’s post. You will love displaying this fall art project.

Mini Monets and Mommies shared a Fall Shaving Cream Art for Kids that takes you step by step through creating amazing fall art trees. The various textures and layers in My Nearest and Dearest’s Fall Art for Kids art project are really beautiful. This post will walk you through creating unique and creative works of art.

Here are two fall art activities from JDaniel’s Mom:

Painting with a corn cob

Cupcake liner eyed owl

The Sunday Showcase is hosted on the following blogs:

JDaniel4′s Mom

Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas

Here Come the Girls

Inspiration Laboratories

We each feature different posts that have linked up, so be sure to check everyone out! We’ll also be pinning our favorites to our Pinterest board.

An InLinkz Link-up

signature

Acorn Math Activities

November 8, 2013 By Deirdre

Last fall we were down on the main street in the town we live in. The local bank had a sea of acorns all over the parking lot. I remember slipping my feet across the ground so I could push the acorns out of my way. A couple of weeks ago I remembered the plethora of acorns and headed back to the bank parking lot to gather some to use for math acorn math activities.

I set out several math activities for JDaniel to do and then let him explore and work with the acorns to complete them. The first activity was to move one acorn at a time using chopsticks with a rubber band around them. (The rubber band makes the chopsticks easy to use.) I asked him to count by ones as he moved them. He later tried counting by 5’s and 10’s as he moved them. The numbers he was counting when we counted by 5’s and 10’s weren’t represented by the appropriate number of acorns. It was a great way though to work on skip counting.

$Acorn Math Activities$

The second activity I shared was to count on by ones and put one more acorn into the next cup and then the cup before it had. We discovered that the cups would only hold five acorns. Rather than continue to do this activity using the ice cube tray we moved on to another type of container.

$Acorn Math Activities -Even and Odd Numbers$

The containers we moved to were cupcake liners. The cupcake liners had a lot more room and were able to hold a lot more. We were able to count to 10. Every acorn was moved with chopsticks.

Why did we use chopsticks for the math activities? Holding and manipulating the chopsticks uses the same muscles as holding a pencil. Using chopsticks is a great way to work on fine motor skills.

$Acorn Math Activities -Counting$

For the last of the math activities, we used two different patterned cupcake liners and acorns. I asked JDaniel to arrange the cupcake liners in an ab pattern.

Then I asked him to put one acorn in the first liner, two in the second liner, and so on. When he had ten acorns in the last cup, I explained to him that all the cups with spider webs on them were odd numbers. That means that 1,3, 5, 7, and 9 are odd numbers. The even numbers were in the liners with the leaf design. That means that 2,4,6, and 8 are even numbers.

I wanted him to get the idea that the even and odd numbers follow an ab pattern. After looking at the cups carefully, he was able to explain to me which cups were even and which were odd and why. In the event nut cups, each nut has a buddy. In the odd nut cups, one nut is leftover.

$acorn-math-activities-collage$

A Book with a Nut Theme

It is fun to share a book that features the same theme or concepts as the activity you have just completed. We used nuts for these math activities so, I picked a book that featured nuts. What did we read? We read the book, Earl the Squirrel. Earl is a squirrel without the desire to find nuts on his own. He has befriended a young girl who supplies him with nuts. (She even provides him with a red scarf. ) Earl’s mom thinks he is spoiled and needs to learn to take care of himself.

Earl decides he needs to prove his mom wrong and that he can do it on his own. By the end of the book, he does learn to find nuts on his own. It isn’t easy. There is a large bull in a field that contains a tree with nuts. Earl has to figure out a way to get the nuts poured down and get past the bull.

Earl the Squirrel is a book filled with adventure, challenges, and tender moments. We loved this fun tale by the author Corduroy and I bet you will too.

This post contains an affiliate link.

I have decided to ask you to link your posts to the Read.Explore.Learn. Facebook page instead of running a link-up. I hope you will stop by and share your children’s book-related activities there

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Fall Bucket List for 2013

September 24, 2013 By Deirdre

I’m a little behind in creating a fall bucket list, but I decided that it wasn’t too late to make one. We started by sitting down at the kitchen table and making a list of things we knew we wanted to have on our fall bucket list. It was no surprise to find that many of the things on our list take place outside or involve time in the kitchen. We spend a lot of time in both of those places.

Rather than hang the handwritten list on the refrigerator I placed the items on the list in Tagxedo. It is a super fun graphic generator. You simply add in your text and the share you want it in and the shape you want the words displayed in. I selected a leaf design and add the stem using Microsoft Paint.

What is displayed on our fall bucket list?

make pumpkin muffins
drink apple cider
visit the pumpkin patch
visit the apple orchard
make applesauce
hike
jump in leaves
paint spider web pumpkins
make apple dips
make Halloween costume

We will probably will do a lot more this fall, but I think our bucket list will give us a good start. I love the way the leaf turned out. It will look great on our fridge.

It is such fun to have ideas we can just look up on the fridge and find. We will be able to decide we want to cross one off our list and just pick one. Having this bucket list up will also give us a reminder of all the fun things we have done in the fall.

We might just have to make a bucket list for each of the seasons each year. I bet some of the activities will change over time and some will be things we yearn to repeat.

What do you have on your fall bucket list?

Fall Pictures- What are autumn colors?

October 19, 2011 By Deirdre

Mrs. Matlock asked us to look for autumn colors this week and share a post on them. JDaniel and I took a walk around our yard and this is what we found.

We loved the bright red seeds hanging from the tree.

This is JDaniel’s tree. It was planted to celebrate his six month birthday. Its leaves are green with a hint of red and yellow.

These leaves are so pretty that I took a close up of them.

It is a little fuzzy, but I still like the close up.

The deep purple leaves of this tree in our front yard remind me of plums.

It is wonderful to see the many colors in this tree’s leaves as it starts to dress for the fall.

JDaniel selected Warty Bumpy and Greenie from a pumpkin lot down on main street. I bet you can guess which one is Greenie.

Fall came late to South Carolina.

The leaves are just starting to change and only a few have fallen to the ground.

We talked about the colors we discovered. There were shades of red, purple, yellow, green and orange.

What other autumn colors should we look for?

What colors are you seeing where you live?

This post is linked to Outdoor Wednesday and Alphabe Thursday.

Pause Life for a Moment- Galit Breen of These Little Waves

October 4, 2011 By Deirdre

I love word weavers. I tend to gravitate to blogs where the writers love words and paint beautiful pictures with them. Galit Breen of These Little Waves is a writer that totally fits that description. The post she is sharing with us today will draw you in and make you want to relax, grab a cool or warm drink, and take in the wonders fall has brought to where you live.

After reading this wonderful piece, please explore her blog for more word tapestries.

Crisp wind wisps my hair and cools my cheeks.

I slide out of my flip-flops and rest my feet on the porch railing. Feeling the sturdiness of our old home -worn wood, peeling paint, rough edges- against my skin, I don’t pull away.

I cross my feet in front of me and lean far back in my seat. The plastic gives way, wraps me up. I breathe in the night and lean even further in.

Bonfire remnants -delicious and smoky and crackling and lasting- trail towards me.

The first splashes of color- golden yellows and royal reds- catch my eye.

And I can’t help but think that the very best of Fall is right here within fingertip reach.

Glancing at Jason in the seat beside me, I take him in too. His long legs reach so very far on the railing. His jeaned legs rest loosely against my bare ones. Our toes melt in the space between.

We pass one (pumpkin) beer back and forth as we sit side by side, somehow small within this quiet.

We listen for our three children, long ago read to and hugged and kissed and tucked into bed “just one more time.” But still, we listen for them, just in case.

Sparingly, he lilts about the stars, the leaves already starting to fall.

I am about to mention fundraisers and schedules and all that swirls in my mind, but I don’t.

My writing, his work, the dishes, the laundry, another Monday- all hang inside, whispering softly in the background, pulling us back.

Ignoring this noise, we continue to sit.

And in this rare quiet, we spot fireflies glowing in their fleeting wonder. The magic is not lost on either one of us.

So pushing our to-do lists even further away, we sit, pass our drink, cross our toes, and breathe our hearts, not daring to disturb this kind of moment.