Fall Art Projects

The Princess likes to create. Here are a few of her fall projects.

This is a autumn tree. She used a twig for the tree trunk. She collected a few small leaves and dipped them in paint and then used them to make leaf prints on the paper. She used green construction paper to make the grass. 

The Princess made a rake with Popsicle sticks. She traced leaf patterns and cut out leaves from construction paper. 

We experimented with negative space art. We used yellow and red paint.  We let them mix a little because we didn't wash out the brush between colors. This made the various shades of orange as well as still showing the red and yellow. We saw online where someone did this with a cut-out of their hand, but we just used our hands directly on the paper. It was a bit messier, but it was fun and the paint was washable so it came off easily. 

The Princess made some sugar cookies too!!! We used a leaf shape and some plain circles, but our favorite was the pumpkin shape. We covered it with icing and then added orange and green sprinkles to them. Unfortunately they were too yummy and we forgot to get pictures of the end product. :-(

Human Body: Nutrition

Print your own little healthy food choice book by clicking on this image:

This is a great little bundle of worksheets for older kids. It works in conjunction with the Fooducate app on a smartphone. Fooducate grades foods based on nutritional information on the packaging.  After a few of the lessons, we started scanning the foods in the pantry with the app to see how healthy they are. Then we went to the grocery store and used the app to help us shop. Very cool way to learn about foods!  

My Plate replaced the Food Pyramid. Here's a cool song/video that explains My Plate:

You can also print a blank "my Plate" so that your children can plan their own healthy meal. 

 

Here's another My Plate printable. The kids can cut out their selections and glue them onto the plates to create their own meals. 

 

This is a great little booklet for younger students. Click to go to the website to print your own. 

The Princess also helped to make a family menu for a few meals to demonstrate her understanding of the things she learned in this lesson. 

 

Human Body: The Brain and Nervous System

The Princess and I watched this cute little video about the brain: 

Check out the Brain Zone website for some cool a facts, games, and a "tour" of a brain. 

 

The Princess and I used clay to create the different regions of the brain:

We also made a cool "brain hat." Click on the picture to make your own.

Here's a cool School House Rock video on the Nervous System:

                 

Eric Carle Style Giraffe Art

The Princess used different items to paint with. She used a small ball and yellow paint first and a scrubbing sponge with black paint. 

We cut a piece of poster board into the shape of a giraffe. 

Once the paper dried, we glued the painted paper onto the poster paper.

 Then we trimmed it up a little bit. 

 Finally we added the black painted paper for the eye and the tail. 

Human Body: Circulatory System

One of the first activities we did with this lesson was to check out pulse. We checked it in our wrists and in our necks. Its a little easier to find it in your neck. We read that if when we're resting our heart rate is lower and when we exercise our heart rate increases. So Parkie checked her pulse while we were sitting for 30 seconds. She exercised for a while and I timed her when she checked her pulse again. 

  

We checked out this awesome little video about the heart. 

We make an awesome example of our blood. The idea came from here. First I put water and a drop of yellow food coloring into a small plastic bottle. I explain to my daughter that this was like our blood plasma. 

 

Then I put Cheerios in a sandwich bag with a lot of red food coloring. My squeezed the closed bag for a while to make sure that the food color got onto all of the Cheerios. She recognized that these were the red blood cells that we had read about. 

My daughter added the red blood cells to the plasma. We didn't have any plastic gloves so it got a little messy. 

Then I got smart and we cut a whole in the corner of the bag and dumped the red blood cells in that way. 

The last step was to add little marshmallows to represent the white blood cells. Here's our final product:

Click on the worksheet to print your own.