Fall Leaf Thanksgiving Countdown

Every year, I get busy with some birthdays and Halloween and feel that Thanksgiving just gets lost in the shuffle.



This year I am trying to change that. I am doing A 25 days of Thanksgiving Praise list, but I have also been trying to get advent calendars together, not just for Christmas but also for Thanksgiving.



So without further ado, here is my Thanksgiving calendar, almost done.

Many of the leaves on the tree are actually laminated separately and will have numbers on them. Then my five year old will have to find the right number on the tree and remove it.... Unless she really wants to do it the other way and add the fall colors to the tree....

Anyways, You should make one too if you have any little ones in your house. It is actually really easy.

1. Take coffee filters and color with markers in fall colors- all over them, in any way, in any combination.


2. Paint the coffee filters with water. It will make the markers run, and as they dry will make the watercolor effect. Do use newsprint underneath, as the markers will bleed through as well.


3. Hang up to dry. We used clothes pins and hung them from the picnic tables umbrella.


4. Cut open a brown paper bag and freehand draw a tree onto the printed side. (I did it on the non printed side and had trouble erasing some of the pencil lines if I veered off)


5. Cut out your tree.


6. Prepare your craft paper. I used blue chalk to make the white paper look more like sky.


7. Glue your tree onto the paper.


8. Separate thirty or so leaves, then glue the rest of the leaves onto the tree.


9. Laminate the tree. Laminate the extra leaves separately.


10. Number your leaves, and use double stick tape to add or remove numbers as needed.

On the picture above, there is a blue stripe towards the top. It actually runs all the way to the bottom. On the other side of the stripe I left room for a title, although I am waiting to add the title after laminating so I can change it to general fall countdown, Halloween countdown, thanksgiving countdown, etc.

I am also planning on making a turkey that will be for Thanksgiving day itself that will be added at the base of the tree. You could also make a Jack-o-Lantern for Halloween, or what not depending on what season you are preparing to celebrate.

I really don't think you can go wrong on this craft. Try it. Even the toddlers can help with the leaf making, the chalk background and the gluing steps.

Inspired by several project ideas that were highlighted on the Crafty Crow.

The Pom-Pom challenge

So we had a meeting the other day that the kids had to attend along with us. In order to keep them busy I cam up with a new challenge for them.

Take a empty Gatorade bottle, a bag of random pom-poms, and a spoon. How many pom-poms can you get in the bottle using only the spoon?

Countdown Calendars

We made these Fall leaves by using markers on coffee filters. They turned out really beautiful. I just finished laminating them so that the kids can handle them on a regular basis. Some are going to get numbers on them and we are going to use them as a count down to Thanksgiving.

We are already planning our advent calendar this year too. We have been collecting TP rolls. I am going to take some of the halloween candy, put two pieces in each roll (cause I have two kids) and wrap it with a string through them.... In the end I will have a bunch of candy filled packages on a string. Then everyday the kids get to open a package after lunch.

Spring Break....

We have been on a semi-forced spring break. We have spent much of our time as of late outdoors while the weather is semi cool still, and running around for appointments, so therefore haven't been working on school much. Bug is starting to want more school again, but I just haven't had my normal energy for doing it. So for now we stay on spring break.....

All about Me -Part one

We started an All about Me book, but it didn't exactly fit in a book, but more like on a wall.... Monkey's self portrait (above)

Bug's self Portrait (below) Under the first and second picture, is the outline of the girls, and I cut them out after they dried and we taped them on the wall in the girls room...... but here is pictures from us making our real life paintings.

A baby diaper Picasso.....

One very messy kitchen floor. I had moved the kitchen table to have enough room to paint, and needless to say, I had to mop the floor when we were done.

Sorry, I didn't turn the photos.

V is for.....

Our V is for Vegetables in our vegetable soup....

vase full of flowers, vegetable garden exploring (each of the flaps opens separately to tell what we hear, see, etc in our garden)....

My veggies garden book... veggie plant growing...... (see pics below)

We subscribe to seed companies for our gardening (though we never actually buy from them) we do use them for school projects! We went through and cut out different veggies and made a book of all our favorites.

our veggie scripture..... (over Savannah's head.... I think these activities need to wait till she can read....)

garden vocabulary book..... (an exercise in coloring and trying to stay in the lines. Mom created.)

How a vegetable grows (book that ties)....

A look at vision......(very hard activity for Savannah at this age (4) but I really wanted to introduce it so that it helps with the doctors stuff, and help her understand what goes on....)

Labelling the parts of an eye, and basic explanations of glaucoma causes.....

And our exploding volcano..... we made it out of a plastic beaker from chick-fil-a and playdoh. It cracked after a few days while we waited to get more baking soda. The pictures are from our second volcano eruption......

There is some extra space in this book, meant to be used for posting pictures, as we couldn't add the volcano actually to the book..... and I forgot to take a picture of the back of the book with the list of books we used.....

Several of the printables are from Homeschool Share, are adaptations of common alphabet activities, or based on information out of library books. We found that a seed catalogue came in very handy for finding pictures of vegetables that we could cut out.

H is for....

For H we worked on houses.... animal houses and people houses. The bottom left corner has a matching game where the animals (in the yellow pocket titled animal match) are matched with the places they live. Over on the other side in the green book, we did places (such as desert, polar region, sea and forest) and glued animals that live there into their habitats. The roof on the far side and the back cover are people houses divided into different rooms and we had to glue the items to the correct room.

I drew a person running and we tried to come up with all the different h words related to the body, people in general.... hip, heel, hurt, hat head, hair, heart, hairbrush, hot dog, happy, hand.

Next to that is a pocket with H vocab words..... with two extra words that are not h words.....works on discriminating sounds and written letters.

The animal match game....

We glued a hand print and two H finds (upper and lowercase) on the outside of the house. I thought I had taken a picture of the house too, but I didn't find it..... I will keep looking.

Our book list...... Let's go home was the best, the others fit in to valentines day too, but not a lot of the actual activities in this book.....

Printables are found on Homeschool Share, kizclub.com, and self drawn.