• Halloween

I wonder if all kids love the idea of Halloween as much as my little boys do. They love to dress up all year long in various costumes and pretend to be random heroes or villains taking over the backyard for the day, but they really love it when October 31 comes around and they can actually get candy for their dress-up shenanigans. They also love pumpkins – the picking out of the perfect one at the pumpkin patch, carving it into a jack-o-lantern, lighting it up every evening, and then watching it turn moldy and mushy not so long afterwards. In this week’s book we talked about all of those things, and it was a blast.

The activity I want to highlight this week is the Science activity for Day Four. For this activity we looked specifically at pages 13 and 25 and talked about how pumpkins grow from seeds. Then we took out the pictures of food provided in this week’s kit, and I asked Malachi to tell me whether or not each one was grown from a seed. The pictured foods were milk, peanut butter, carrots, eggs, oranges, cheese, and pears. I was happy to see that he knew about the fruits being grown from seeds, but we definitely had to learn about peanut butter and carrots coming from seeds – we even looked up pictures of them in seed form on the internet just to prove Mama was right. Then we took the chart from the kit and Malachi wrote each food name in the appropriate column (milk, eggs, and cheese in the Do Not Grow From Seeds column, and peanut butter, carrots, oranges, and pears in the Grow From Seeds column).

At the end of this week when I looked back over the 7 days of activities using the book Halloween, I was amazed at all my little guy had learned from one little book. For more information about the AlphaSkills Read with Sarah curriculum and our family, see the AlphaSkills Blog Introduction.