Leaf art

I keep collecting colourful leaves to make something with, and N keeps bringing in her bounty as well, after every walk. I have a lot of ideas for them, but they end up just sitting there,

 

Workout for little fingers

This year we went to the PYO farm to get a pumpkin, but I was unorganised and we were too late – the ones on the fields were all rotten, but we were already there and kids wanted to PICK SOMETHING!

So, we found a lot of crops that were not being picked and were going to waste and we took a few things home. Our loot included few sunflower heads, some corn ears and some broad beans that were lying about in the field. Girls were particularly excited about these ones once they have discovered that under the dried out brown pods were very brightly coloured pinkish -purple beans.

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We brought our treasure home and without delay they started peeling and shelling things. That was a good workout for their fingers!

We are going to throw in some conkers and some acorns and later on I’ll make them an autumn sensory bin. We haven’t had one for a while and girls love them! Hopefully the beans and corn wouldn’t start rotting. It’s quite peculiar thing happening in this neck of the woods – seeds tend to stat growing at the harvest time instead of saving their energy till next year.  I don’t quite understand it. Some of the corn that we picked started sprouting right on the cob, beans were sprouting inside their pods and acorns in our garden are rooting themselves to the ground! I need to look it up, I am pretty sure that’s not how plant’s self-preservation supposed to work…

After a while of shelling beans I matter-of-factly put some cocktail sticks out and engineering began! I started them off with building a square-based pyramid, hoping to go through some of the other 3D shapes, but they had their own plans, and I didn’t mind. (beans were very soft, freshly picked – this wouldn’t work with dried ones)

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Autumn arts

We made some acorn deer today and learnt to use some tools (screwdrivers to make holes with and pliers to snap toothpicks with). Mya’s deer kept falling and she was getting frustrated. We looked at it’s legs which were all parallel and straight and talked about how much floor surface they are taking. We experimented with trying to balance on a balance board and decided that the stability is better when the legs are diagonal and spread wider, so they are taking more floor surface, I.e. the wider your support the more stable you are. We remembered examples from skiing and from some story book about snow shoes, where snow shoe surface was wider than foot surface therefore stopped you from sinking into the snow (not quite the same but similar principal). So we repositioned the legs and it stopped falling.

When the Deer was finished Mya discovered engraving. She sat for a while engraving something on the acorns.