Harvest Celebration

We celebrated the harvest just as the Pilgrims and Indians did so many years ago...
We had a Farmer's Market where we played with real vegetables. We worked and shopped and some of us took our vegetables home to cook up various soups and stews...

A perfect book for harvest time, The Enormous Potato by Aubrey Davis and

Dusan Petricic

  

had us harvesting potatoes. We scrubbed them,

peeled them (great for some fine motor action!),

cut them

 and then after boiling them in water, 

we mashed them, mixed them with cheese and ate them for lunch. 

YUM!

We had so much fun with the potato masher, we decided to print with them!

The Enormous Carrot by Vladimir Vagin

had us painting with carrots of all sizes- big, little, short, fat, skinny...

We loved dramatizing the story! We didn't have a real enormous carrot, so we had to improvise with orange water in a bottle. It was heavy and hard to pull out of the "ground". We all had to work together!

Hearing Hare and Bear's conflict in Tops and Bottoms

had us talking about which vegetables grow in the ground and which ones grow on top. Or, which one grows in the "middle"! Can you guess? You got it!

We painted with corn on the cob. Some of us rolled it, some of us stamped with it. No matter the process, the products were amazing!

Guess what we had for lunch!?! It's a definite favorite!

We read Cranberry Thanksgiving 

by Harry and Wende Devlin, 

played with cranberries in our sensory bins and water play, 

and used the recipe in the book to make cranberry muffins to have for our harvest celebration lunch.

We dramatized the story of "Stone Soup" while we listened to this tale about sharing and friendship- a perfect tale for Thanksgiving. This gave us practice for making our own "stone soup".

 Our goal was "stone soup" or a better name would perhaps be "friendship soup". We all worked together to cut up all kinds of vegetables and then put them in a pot for some yummy soup for our "Harvest Celebration".

It's almost too pretty to eat! Almost...

Giving thanks just like "Bear" in 

Bear Gives Thanks, 

we did some Thanksgiving yoga poses which are great for balance and body awareness.

Besides being thankful for our families and friends, we are thankful for...

the sun and the sky-

the birds-

the flowers-

the rain

the trees-

the kites in the breeze-

the moonlight

and the stars in the sky- 

We talked about being thankful and the things we are thankful for. We used our vegetable prints to make leaves for our "Thankful Trees". 

Happy Thanksgiving!