Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Discover Your Town

The great thing about being a stay at home mom is being able to go out and do fun things around town while other kids are in school. We frequently go to museums, parks, nature preserves, and farms- which are all great learning experiences. There is an awesome website called Zvents that lists numerous events going on in your city. I write for our local moms website, MomsCharlotte, and update our calendar weekly plus write daily fun events for children to go do. So I'm luckily in the know for things to go do around Charlotte. But you can be too by going to Zvents!

Today we took a trip to the Schiele Museum. They had a series going on that included pumpkin panting, leaf art, dress up, pumpkin golf and more! The event was free and we got to tour the museum. We were able to get there before school let out, so we pretty much had the museum to ourselves. Even though Ella was on her best behavior, it was still nice to know she wouldn't be bothering anyone. She loved naming all of the stuffed animals that she knew and learned a few more.They also had a farm outside of the museum with sheep, pigs, and chickens. They had old barns and houses that were gorgeous! I love old stuff. It was a great opportunity to talk about how things were done before we had electricity and how a farm was run. What we did in the art room is stuff you can do at home with your child. Instead of using paint brushes, we used non-toxic washable paint pens to decorate the pumpkins. This is less messy and the paint dried in a minute. Invite a few friends over and decorate your pumpkins together. Better yet, take your child with a couple of their friends to a pumpkin patch and pick your own pumpkin! This will teach your preschooler how things are grown and harvested. I'm hoping the weather will cooperate this week so we can finally go!The leaf art was really easy. Take a leaf and put it between 2 pieces of paper. Unwrap a crayon and have your child gently rub the crayon on the paper. You will get a cool leaf print! If you'd like to get more creative, melt a brown, red, orange, and yellow crayon separately and pour in a small square container. Note-if you melt them all together at once, you will get 1 color. After it dries, pop out the new crayon and have them use that to get the leaf imprint. The fall colors mixed make the leaf more festive.Luckily Charlotte has tons of things to go do daily for preschoolers and most are free. There are also homeschool communities in your area that you can contact for events and socialization.

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