This week was a little bit laid back after I returned from the Relevant conference and just wanted to BE with my kids. Tuesday we took a field trip to a local pumpkin patch and the rest of the week we spent reading so many books about pumpkins while cuddled up on the couch. Basically it was a wonderful week. Laid back, relaxing and fun.

And that is a good thing!

Kaleb picked out his own pumpkin and was so excited to bring it and a little gourd home. Best part of the trip though? Mommy got to drive him around on one of the go-cart style bikes…and he LOVED that! Sadly, I have none of those pictures on my camera, but Cindy from Along the Way was MORE than happy to snap away at us being silly.

We read the Pumpkin Patch Parable and also My Happy Pumpkin a lot this week and talked about how Jesus scoops the ‘yucky stuff’ out of our life and HIS light shines through us. Daddy helped us carve our pumpkins one night and Kaleb decided what shapes he wanted his pumpkin to be carved in {square eyes, a cross nose and a crescent mouth}. Not like the book, but he wanted to keep the cross for the nose..and mommy had to add a tooth for fun. :)

While we had our pumpkins scooped out and ready, we also did a little science experiment {I’ll be sharing it on Sunday} and then we wrapped up our pumpkin and Bible time with the Hillsongs Tell the World dvd ~ “Let Your Light Shine” song {which turned into a ‘one more time’ several times}.

We’ve been eating pumpkin seeds all week and did MUCH more, but pictures just fell by the wayside this week as we focused on being together and having fun!

Additional Resources

• For more fall and pumpkin ideas, visit my pumpkin post from last year.
• Sharing God’s Light on Halloween from 1+1+1=1 ~ this is where we printed off a lot of the pumpkin printables this year {and last!}
• Once Upon a Book: Parable of the Pumpkin Patch ~ links to another one of the printables we used

Stories & Books We Used

More Preschool Links:

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We had a shorter week because I headed out of town for a few days to attend the Relevant Conference. I’m so excited to be together with an amazing group of women ~ including Carisa {from 1+1+1=1} and Kris {from Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers}…but that’s a post for another day!

Before I left we had a few days of time where we started a unit on fall. We’ll continue more next week with a focus on pumpkins since our pumpkin patch trip was rescheduled and that will tie in nicely {dontcha think?}. Here are a few highlights of our week:

Fall Leaf Mobile ~ The older three went on a leaf hunt, so Kaleb picked a few of his own too. His were rather dry and crunchy, so we used a bunch of tissue paper leaves that I laminated and hung them from a twig to make a mobile to decorate our school room.

Nature Collage ~ Kaleb’s collection of leaves, flowers and sticks was glued to a piece of paper to grace our walls. :)

Leave Jumping ~ We put different colored leaves on the floor {from the dollar section at Target, I think} and Kaleb had fun jumping, hopping, stepping or leaping from one leaf to another when I called out a color for him to hop to/from.

Acorn Tic Tac Toe ~ I posted about our season tic tac toe board yesterday, but Kaleb had so much fun trying to learn how to play Tic Tac Toe with this. We played it over and over and over…

Fall Sensory Bin ~ A lot of beans, fall leaves, acorns, and tiny gourds that the boys have had fun playing with all week.

Gray Squirrel Rhyme ~ Just because I think it’s fun to embarrass myself, here’s a little rhyme that we’re doing too. I’m MUCH more enthusiastic when doing it with Kaleb…but since this is going out into the great wide web world, I’ll spare you a little enthusiasm {no snickers, please}.

Stories & Books We Used

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More Preschool Links:

Imagine my surprise when I sat down at the end of last week to start planning for the upcoming week and realized that we had already finished up seven weeks of school and it was one of our scheduled breaks!

We did plan to do some fun stuff this week though, including a trip to the pumpkin patch…until the trip was cancelled because of rain. Instead we spent several days playing with friends and re-organizing our rooms {good ol’ switchover to warmer clothing!!} and also straightening up our school area to get back in gear for our next block of school time. :)

Overall, not an exciting week in terms of sharing school plans, but still a fairly productive week in terms of ‘what Mommy thinks’.

What did YOU do this week?

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Share what you are doing with your kids! Please link your exact blog post to the Mr. Linky below and link back here too! The updated guidelines can be found here if you need them.

More Preschool Links:

• ABC Printables
• Color and Shape Printables
• Preschool Lapbooks and Tot Books: Policemen, fireman and more!
• Learning Songs
• Math and Counting Printables
• Phonics and Reading Printables
• Science Printables
• Preschool Corner Guidelines
• Preschool Planning Pages
• Preschool Resources Main Page

The big excitement of the week was that Kaleb started drawing with PURPOSE this week. He has been tracing the letters and lines over the last few weeks and coloring much more, but has never tried to create something on his own.

The last two weeks have been technology-void in our household {Mommy induced}. That has meant no tv, no Wii, no itouch…nada. Zilcho. Nothing.

As a result, the kids have been drawing and coloring up a storm and creating like crazy. Even though we’ve gone through a full ream of paper, I won’t complain! :)

Here is the result of Kaleb’s drawing and creating. Can you guess what it is?

Did you guess a helicopter? He’s just all excited to hang it on the fridge. :)

Interested in how our workboxes shaped up for the week? During the week I rotated between two different items in each of the boxes. The last box was our ‘special’ box that had he could play with AFTER he had finished his other boxes. Note: this workbox grid is a part of my free preschool planning forms.

We’re still going through the alphabet and reviewing the letters. This week we added F-K to the stack of letters. We continued to use our Grasshopper Preschool Prep Kit {ABC’s and Following Directions} for the gel tracing and letter fishing.

We have some acorns and Kaleb would roll the number die that we have {a 1” block with the number 1 through 6 written on the sides}. When he rolled a number, he tried to identify what number it was and then we worked on counting out that number of acorns using 1:1 correspondence.

Once the counting was finished, we had fun sorting the acorns by size {big/small}, by color and seeing which color we had more of.

Kaleb also had a BLAST participating in our science experiment with us this week. I had to print of his own personal copy of the recording sheet so he could color along with us. Ever since, he’s been asking to ‘do science’. :)

The weather was a little icky at the end of the this week, so on Thursday we played LOTS and lots of games. :)

Next week I’ll have the first half of my do-a-dot pages for you all ~ ready to share. Still working on the last half, but hang in there!

In Our Workboxes

Here are some of the things that were in Kaleb’s workboxes this week.

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