Forests and Fall

After baby E was born, we kind of slacked off on doing a "theme" each month. We still did quite a few activities, but they weren't organized by any theme. Our summer consisted of us spending a LOT of time outdoors. We live in San Diego, it would be blasphemous not to. So the hot summer afternoons were spent playing at the park, blowing bubbles on the lawn, and splashing in the ocean. With the Summer Nights going on at the Zoo, we also spent many evenings there - watching the various human performers and picking one animal to visit for each trip. We watched hippos swim, orangutans romp and play, a cheetah chase after a bird, and the beautiful colors of all the birds in the aviaries. We saw a variety of "less graceful" animal moments: giraffes clean their noses, rhinoceroses blow bubbles in their pool, and lions cough up hairballs.  We also spent quite a bit of time at SeaWorld with the dolphins, sea lions, penguins, and even their porcupine! There was the county fair in June - with horse shows and turkey races. Even our library got in on the summer fun with Wednesday activity nights. They had a musical jamboree, a magician, and even a night of science fun.

I can understand why not many people want to leave San Diego.

As we're entering fall, though, I feel that we need to start our themes once again. Aside from (all of) us learning a lot through these themes, they also let us learn and explore many areas of San Diego that we don't normally visit. It helps set up craft and cooking activities, and gives us new topics to talk about.

So back to themes :)

This month we are going camping at Sequoia National Park. We are all very very excited about this trip as it will be our first camping trip in over a year and our first major camping trip since A was a baby. 

With this in mind, forests seemed a natural theme for the month! I started the theme a few days into September, so I'm feeling a bit unprepared. We have been raiding our own bookshelves for books about forests and animals, and we also need to visit our library. We have talked about wildlife that lives in our local forests - deer, turkeys, birds, rabbits, and squirrels.  We have also been working hard at creating our own tree out of mixed art methods - will post pictures soon :)