Letter of the Week - P

I know, I know, F comes after E... Faith told me this several times this week but I decided to break out of my conformity shell and not work strictly in alphabetical order.  It is fall and the pumpkins are growing bigger and bigger; going to the pumpkin patch with our LIFE Group over the weekend seemed like a great family fun event to anchor our P is for Pumpkin weeks!  I am attempting to do pumpkin for both weeks of P... we'll see how pumpkin'd out we get!
The first craft we did was a messy one: cutting open a pumpkin to get out all the seeds which we saved for a subsequent craft.  I then roasted and pureed the remaining pumpkin flesh and used it in a pumpkin cake during the week. 

We washed and dried the seeds for our next craft, a pumpkin seed pumpkin. I didn't tape the seeds down like the directions say (because I didn't re-read them!) so we just started out trying to paint the seeds.

That did not work out so well.  We then moved to the painting with you hands method and that was much more fun and exciting and it got the job done!

We let them dry all day and then after dinner I pulled them off the cardboard and the girls glued them inside their pumpkins.  They turned out really cute and it really was a fun craft!

 

Our family fun day was a trip to the pumpkin patch.  It was awesome weather and a great time for the whole family.

We did take two short pumpkin breaks during the weeks to do color days.  First we did pink.  Faith is currently in love with a series of books called Pinkalicious by Victoria Kann and everything is better in pink so the pink day was super fun for her!  We started with our standard pink collage...

Then I had the girls mix white and red paint to make pink and paint on their collage.  Faith remembered that white and black made gray from our E is for Elephant week!  She really enjoyed painting with her own pink paint.



 It was back to pumpkins again to decorate our pumpkins from the patch.  We painted them with glue and then sprinkled glitter on them.  Next time I will use the glitter shakers rather than individual packets.  The girls loved it!

 For our purple day we mixed red and blue to make purple paint and dipped the ends of some old wine corks into it in order to make "grapes."  Incidentally we found Purplicious by Victoria Kann this week at the library!

We followed that up with mixing blue and red food coloring into a jar of milk to make purple milk.  The girls drank it with dinner and loved every second of it!

Our final pumpkin craft was a variation of this one, without the face.  The girls really had fun with this one, I am sad I forgot to get a picture of the end result :(

 

Our pumpkin books during these two weeks were Its Pumpkin Time and Patty's Pumpkin Patch, the later being the girls' favorite of the two.