Princesses, Pumpkins and Petting Zoos

It's been another two weeks.  Time flies when Grandmum is visiting.

We've had several sessions of soccer.  Tobias is slowly learning to pay attention through the whole class, especially if it means he can ride on the parachute.  Genevieve painted some pumpkin art and played with pumpkin slime.  We colored and assembled a cardboard haunted house and a small foam princess castle.  She made a web of friends in art class and set up her birthday aquarium.

We went to Lambtown festival, or as Genevieve called it Unicorn festival.  We had a nice walk there, rode a train, rode some ponies, went to a petting zoo, painted a pumpkin, helped Grandmum pick out some yarn, and rocked out to some music.

We enjoyed gymnastics, the park, storytimes, dance and music class.  The author came to one storytime, and after we were able to explore a career fair.  The library also had a speaker about bats, who brought some along for the kids to see.  Our  friends met us at a pumpkin patch.  We also started the fall  session of zoo classes.  Genevieve feed the giraffes, met some animals and made art around the habitat themes.  They talked about animals and skills needed to survive in the Savannah and swamps.  We also played at Fairy Tale Town.

When we weren't in class, we spent most of our time inside to avoid the smoke from the wild fires.  We talked about the fires and made some pictures to show people we were thinking of them.  We read about and did some science experiments.  We started a book about the first explorers to possibly reach America and read about Sukkot and Diwali.  We colored, played with slime, played some PBS Kids games and workbook pages.  Genevieve started her Star lab and tried out some new puzzles and games.  Some of her new puzzles are word building.  She also got a great geography game (Scrambled States of America) and The Memory Palace by Peaceable Kingdom.

She helped decorate for her princess party and made some pizza for everyone.  The girls had fun dressing up and making lots of different art - wings, jewelry boxes and princesses.

Two Weeks of Fun

We just finished a great book - Vincent's Starry Night and Other Stories.  This book sorts some interesting pieces of artwork from all over the world and gives them a little historical context.  There are only a few pages for each piece, so it's not too hard for short attention spans.  After we finished, we headed back to the Crocker Art Museum for a fun day looking at art.  We like to follow that up with a walk through Old Sacramento, stopping at the school house and ending at the train museum.

We started working on our own book about the way things move.  We read about ramps.  I wrote some basic principles about directions and force and Genevieve watched for examples throughout our week.  Gymnastics and the park gave some great examples, but we also went to the trampoline park and Imagine That.  They painted some cars and a plane.

Of course, we still had our other weekly activities.  We played soccer and went to art class, where Genevieve made a craft stick Frankenstein.  We walked around the area and rode the small train too.  We had some great fun playing at the park and with dance and gymnastics classes.  Mr. Dan read about fall in storytime.  We had our last week of animal songs at Music Makers.

At  home, Genevieve helped design a haunted graveyard and made some fall jewelry with Grandma.  Genevieve started working on princess decorations for her birthday party too.  She finished some sun catchers, wind chimes and a mobile.  Tobias has been really interested in lining up his toys and taking tours of our solar system, walking by the line of pictures on our wall as we name them.

As October began, we celebrated Chuseok, making some lunar observations and painting the night sky.  She also helped me carve a pumpkin in a pattern of stars and moons.  We read about spooky animals like bats and spiders plus dealing with feeling scared.