Welcome with a little pumpkin candy!

Welcome to our little homeschool blog! I am a mom to two boys, ages 6 and 4. I started homeschooling my oldest last year about this time. I started this blog to share and document what we are doing or have done before, and to help anyone else who might be homeschooling and need some ideas.
We started last year with a pumpkin theme. I am not theme teaching as much this year but for the kindergarten year it was perfect.
Did you know you can teach math and have fun and eat candy too? :) All you need is one bag of autumn mix or whatever mulit bag you prefer. Now this is how we used the bag with my six year old today to practice his math facts. He has to show me with our candy manipulatives and tell me the answer.

My four year old is learning to represent numbers with the candy manipulatives.

We love the pumpkins. They don't last long.

Another fun thing you can do with this bag is to take a. big scoop of them and sort them. We did this last year. Notice my son made a pile of the broken ones. He is so like his mom. They never put enough pumpkins in the bag either.

Another skill we worked on in kinder was being able to show one more than or one less than. We lined up the pumpkins to make the task easier and counted them. Then he would make another line to show one more than we had before. If you are teaching a preschooler, another concept that could be taught using candy is one to one correspondence. Have your child match pumpkin for pumpkin, or even pumpkin for candy corn. Every pumpkin needs a partner!

We practiced patterning with the candy too. Make sure to allow them to be creative. It is important they know how to pattern ABAB, ABC, ABC, and ABBA. The above is ABAB.

Here is ABBA.

Little ones and big ones can practice this. After all the learning is over it sure is fun to eat too!