Hanson's Ridge
October is one of my favorite months of the year. Unfortunately, it's filled with so many good things that I can't get to them all without feeling completely overwhelmed. Usually we go apple picking and to the Renaissance Festival in either September or October. We didn't get to that this year, unfortunately. We finished up our apple-themed Ivy Box from September, including an apple seed addition activity. We followed up by reading books like The Apple Doll by Elisa Kleven and The Apple Pie Tree by Zoe Hall. We are planning on making some apple crisp (because making gluten free pie crusts is too much work for me!) and our own apple dolls. We also read a book called Awesome Autumn which was jam packed with information about seasonal changes for plants, animals, and people. It's one I'd like to come back to next year. We worked on self-help skills, including cooking and doing dishes (both kids) and getting dressed independently (DC). They made pudding a couple of times and we made and decorated cookies. We made alphabet cookies to celebrate finishing Foundations A (our literacy program) and Jack O' Lantern cookies for Halloween. I've been trying to play more board games with the kids to work on social emotional skills. We have to balance out competitive games with cooperative games to keep things going smoothly. Count Your Chickens is a nice cooperative game. I like that our Ivy Boxes come with games too. We worked on some new skills with CE too :) She's rolling all over the place so she has a nice safe play yard to play in. We put in a mirror (Montessori inspired) and she loves playing in there. She is occasionally joined by her siblings. In fact, I'm sitting next to her right now! She will be six months old in a few days, which is when we generally start introducing food. With the other two kids, we did "baby led weaning" which basically means giving baby soft finger foods instead of baby food, usually part of what we would be eating anyway. We didn't use baby food much because both of the big kids were so eager to start with the real thing. Plus, store-bought baby food is expensive and making it is more time than I want to spend. But this kid makes sure I don't run on absolutes. Twice a week, I take AW to dance class. I like to go alone because there isn't much space for CE to hang out and she's too squirmy to hold for an hour. I try to feed her right before I leave, but sometimes the timing isn't quite right with naps. She won't take a bottle, something we are working on. She's not quite ready for table food of any kind as far as fine motor skills or concerned, and she's still a little slouchy in her high chair. So, on Saturday we tried some baby food. This baby loooooooved it. One of my favorite mornings of the year was a spontaneous fall scavenger hunt in our yard. I found the scavenger hunt here. I've been trying to be more intentional about nature study. We studied acorns from the yard, read about oak trees and acorns in A Handbook of Nature Study, and even brought in a spider egg sac to observe (in the confines of a mason jar). When the spiders finally hatched, we released them outside. I was pretty proud of my ability to handle that particular activity. In the end, it was actually pretty cool. They built webs from the bottom of the jar to the top. All the same, I don't think I'll repeat this (sorry, younger kids). We have gone on a couple of fall adventures: we walked a section of the Bull Run-Occoquan trail which was absolutely gorgeous. We went to the National Zoo with three families from our childbirth class five years ago. We went to the Claude Moore Colonial Market Fair and the Children's Science Center. Our Ivy Box theme for the month was "Rainforests" (not the actual shipped box, but a holdover from when we had a backlog). It coincidentally tied in well with our visit to the zoo, where we visited the "Amazon" rainforest exhibit. We looked for the sloth, but didn't find one. They did have an artificial kapok tree, which was the tree in The Rainforest Grew All Around. In the box, we had a kapok seed pod which was really cool. The kids enjoyed observing it and feeling the fluffy seeds inside. We talked about the layers of the rainforest and played a version of chutes and ladders. And of course we celebrated Halloween. We kicked off the month with our Halloween-themed Kinder Club event with our local homeschool group, Homeschoolers of Bealeton. We also attended the Trunk or Treat event in town as well as trick or treating at the kids' grandparents' house. Whew! Like I said, it was a busy month.
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AuthorHi! I'm Stephanie Hanson. I live with my husband, Himself, on Hanson's Ridge in Virginia. Archives
September 2017
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