In The Harrison Household: 2011

Winter is quickly approaching in MN but it has held of beautifully this year, though at times I have had some MAJOR whiplash from its 90* one day to its 40* the next, but it is STILL above zero so I am happy :) And I don't think we've really had a HARD freeze yet!! Before too much time passes on these pictures I wanted to give all my readers a glimpse at how this Harrison family enjoys the autumn!!

First up-the Apple Orchard!! We love to pick our own apples and we love that we have an orchard so close to home that allows us to do this. The kids REALLY got into it this year-check it out!

Then there is the good old Pumpkin Patch! Normally we do the pumpkin patch at the Apple Orchard but this year we tried a new location that turned out to be a great place for the kids to explore!

Here they are finding their pumpkins:

Another thing they had at the PP was kittens for sale. Joshua LOVES cats, they are his favorite animal right now and he loves the oranges ones the most!

Madelynn loves the kitties too, but she thought they were baby dolls, and wanted to carry them all over the place so we just sat her in the crate with them :)

Mommy and Moo say cheese.

But I think the greatest excitement for the day at the pumpkin patch was in the corn pit! My kids had never been in a corn pit before, neither had I and boy did we have fun! However corn in the pants is NOT much fun :/

These next shots are a hoot! Joshua loves jumping INTO the corn!!

And after a trip the the pumpkin patch the next thing on our autumn to do list is to carve pumpkins!! We did it this year with GaPa and everyone had a blast! What a great night we had!

Madelynn painted her pumpkin with Do-A-Dots

Joshua carved his pumpkin and jumped right in

Working on putting a face on :)

GaPa put his face on the pumpkin too

Family shots

And the final results

** I HAVE TRIED AND TRIED AND TRIED TO GET THIS POST TO LOOK RIGHT AND IT IS NOT WORKING!! SO SORRY! UNLESS I DELETE ALL PICTURES/TEXT AND START AGAIN-WHICH I DON'T WANT TO DO-I HAVE TO LEAVE IT :/ **

Last week we worked on letter E. Joshua LOVES his letters and is getting so quick with his ability to understand his letters, the sounds they make, what they look like on paper and in ASL. He is always disappointed when school is done and begs for more "book sheets" (worksheets) so he can practice more. Its so hard to believe he's only 3.5 when he pulls stunts like that!

Joshua told me that "Es are too easy, they are just a bunch of lines"...Who is this kid??

Joshua begins his Do-A-Dot E page...he ALWAYS insists on using the green marker because GREEN is his favorite color!!

Here is a picture of Joshua working on his Ee is for Elephant puzzle. He whizzed through this and kept wanting to do it over and over. After about 10times, literally, he told me "mom, this is a baby puzzle, I could do it with my eyes closed!" LOL the things this boys says!!!

Joshua finishes up his Ee page :)

This week's coloring page consisted of Color By Number page. Joshua had to match the color to the number from the grid above and then find the area on the elephant that matched the number. He did great!! At first he was overwhelmed, but when I handed him ONE crayon at a time and asked him to match it to the number on the grid and find it on the picture he did much better!

This is his "I'm trying TOO hard to smile" face-but he was SO proud!!

Joshua got to work on his e collage this past week too and it is one of his FAVORITE things to do. We talk about all the things that start with letter E and we try to find things in our art bin that start with the letter.

This week's letter is E and the only thing we found that started with e was EYES! Joshua had a BLAST gluing eyes onto his letter E. He said it looked like a monster!

He was SO proud!

Another activity Joshua likes is doing a letter hunt!! Each letter we have a short story (one paragraph) that has a lot of the letter of the week in it. Joshua's job is to circle all of the letters of the week, both capital and lowercase...

And like my dear friend Ms. Shelley, I love taking pictures of Joshua's hands at work!!

My kids love to line toys up in straight lines, and I hear my husband was the same way! Madelynn will line up her babies, and her blocks, Joshua always does it to cubes, his cars, trains and more, so this activity is GREAT!

The kids need to line up cubes (or the bears we have) along the shape of the letters to 'trace' them. Both kids love to get in on this fun, and Madelynn (almost 2) is starting to line them up within the outline of the letters!!

Here!!! All Done!!! And so proud!

Joshua lines up the Elephants from biggest to smallest, and then again from smallest to biggest!

Using clothes pins to count our number cards! Each card (this week it has an elephant on it) has a number on it, Joshua reads the number out and then places that same number of clothes pins on the card!

And Elephant Color Matching!! Each colored elephant is split into 2 pieces with a unique design for each color. Joshua matches the colored pieces together to complete the puzzle match!

Joshua working on "What comes next?" patterns!!!

Madelynn saying CHEESE as she wanted me to take a picture of her :)

We ended last week with our "Now I know My ABC's" page

Normally we use construction paper, glue and google eyes to make our animcal, but I didn't have any grey paper for our elephant so we decided to use grey paint!!