Autumn

As the leaves are just starting to fall off the trees I thought that this week would be a good place to start with the topic Autumn! Yesterday morning we went for a nature walk in our local woods to see what we could find to add to the 'Autumn tray' (a tray bought from Ikea that gets used for all sorts of things in our house, mostly as a sand pit!). Off we went armed with Daddy and a bucket. At first Joshua didn't quite get the idea of collecting things as he found it more fun to empty the bucket every time it had something in it, so we got Daddy to carry it and Joshua to help put things in it!
We managed to collect quite a few different bits and pieces and to stop it looking so bare I added some macaroni and some pumkin and sunflower seeds.

Here is our Autumn tray:

This activity needed a lot of supervision but Joshua loved picking up all the different things and shaking them, and throwing them! He learnt two new words. 'Conker' and 'Acorn' and he had fun trying to tip the tray upside down! I'm sure he got something out of it though!
I used some scavenger hunt pictures that I got off pinterest but I cant show them here as i cant remember which blog I got them from but you can find similar at: http://deceptivelyeducational.blogspot.com/2011/07/nature-scavenger-hunt.html
Obviously because Joshua is quite young the things we had on our hunt were slightly different. We had:
1. Conker
2. Acorn
3. Squirell
4. Bird
5. Butterfly
6. Feather
7. Tree
8. Leaf
and anything else we collected was a bonus!
I intend to make my own cards for this and laminate them so when I have done so I will post them on here.
We came home and looked through a book called 'In the Park, Baby's First Words'. It's by Parragon Books but I think its out of print as I couldn't find it on www.amazon.co.uk .
We also counted how many conkers we had and how many Acorns.

That's it for now, happy scavenging!!

Lots of love
Ellie x