I was going to post about our plan for the next few weeks, but as I was writing it, it was getting pretty boring with no pictures and not many real concrete ideas of what we were going to do, so I decided to wait a bit until we had a few activities under our belt.  November will have two themes, and the first one is TRANSPORTATION.  I really just chose this because we have a big trip across the country in a few weeks, so I thought it would be appropriate.  To start, we headed to the library...

Transportation books.
Go, Dog, Go, P.D. Eastman
That's Not My Train, Fiona Watt
That's Not My Plane, Fiona Watt
Trucks (Baby Touch and Feel) and Tough Trucks, Tony Mitton
Big Wheels, Anne Rockwell
Boats, Byron Borton
The Little Dump Truck, Margery Cuyler
Maisy Drives the Bus and How Will You Get There Maisy, Lucy Cousins
Sheep in a Jeep and Sheep on a Ship, Nancy Shaw

So far Riley prefers Go, Dog. Go! and That's Not My Train, oh and that little mini Let's Go Sesame Street book,  We have read those ones SO MANY times already.  She'll come up to me and say "Go?? Go? Go??" which means she can't find her Go, Dog. Go! book, and wants some help... and then we read it.  Over. and over. and over again.

Stories/Poem/Rhymes/Songs
Lonely Bus Driver (finger rhyme), The Little Train, Tugboat, Engine on the Track (finger rhyme), Wheels on the Bus, I'm a Little Airplane (sung to I'm a Little Teapot tune), Row Row Row your Boat, Leaving on a Jet Plane, Twinkle Twinkle Traffic Light, and whatever other ones I can think of or find!

Arts and Crafts
This has been pretty fun so far!  We did a "painting" activity with the colors of the stoplight (red, yellow, green).  This involved putting paint in large plastic bags, and taping them to the window, and letting Riley "paint".  We also painted by running cars through the paint and creating tracks with the wheels, but she preferred to use her fingers.  Best part? No clean up!

Our second craft so far involved making mini trains, cars, and boats with foam shapes.  Now you could use these shapes to identify both colors and shapes, but I chose just to talk to Riley about the shapes so as not to confuse her.  We actually got the shapes for free at a garage sale, I just bought the large foam piece and some glue, and voila!  Amazingly enough, somehow she picked out the circles with 100% accuracy.  Apparently, the girl knows her circles! 

Now, obviously Riley required a LOT of help to "make" these... this part of the activity was meant to have her help me pick out the shapes, and put the glue on, and then I put them on the brown paper.  Her creation looked more like this... :)

Activities
This was a little tricky because we don't actually own a whole lot of "transportation" items.  We have a truck shape sorter, which is still very popular, and a train puzzle, which Riley likes, but needs help completing as it's a little advanced.  We've been working on learning the colors of the stoplight, and have three different "color bowls" full of red, green, and yellow items, respectively.  They are all just random items we had around the house.  Riley didn't understand the color sorting concept at first, but she's starting to get it and is actually really interested in it, so we'll keep doing it.

I turned around for a second, and Riley had taken the colored pipe cleaners and put them on like necklaces!  And she kept them there for a quite a long time!

I also set up a transportation "treasure box" (also known as a sensory box), which she really likes!  It looked like this before she started playing with it:

There are black beans (like the road), rocks, "sand," matchbox cars, an assortment of mini trucks, wheels (which are actually yo yos), little puzzles that rattle when riley shakes them, yellow pipe cleaners (like lines of the road), spinning tops with trucks on them.  Now, this was a bit of a gamble, as I wasn't sure if Riley would (1) stuff all the little non-edibles in her mouth or (2) dump them all over the floor and make a HUGE mess.  Well, she did try to eat the black beans at first, and I let her explore having one in her mouth (mostly because I couldn't fish it out of there), and she decided she didn't like it, and was pretty easily redirected after that.  As for making a mess, she would take handfuls and put them on the floor, but then she like to pick them up and put them all back, so that was no problem.  She also liked to pick black beans off of a strip of packing tape, and putting them into the truck bed...

Outings/adventures.
We haven't done any big outings yet, but when we do go out, I make more of an effort to point out things transportation related, especially things we may have read about in some of our books.  Riley points out cars and bikes, and we went and saw the train, and we have plans to take Riley on her first train ride soon!

ABCs
I recently discovered starfall.com, and Riley LOVES it.  It has this alphabet part that Riley is really into, and she can now say the letters A-E as well as their sounds.  If she sees my computer, she runs to it and shouts "A A A A A A!!" to do the letter activity.  If you have a little one, definitely check it out.  I didn't want to do too many letters at once (or have her staring at the computer for too long), so this week we only looked at A-E.  Maybe we'll do a few more letters next week, or we might stick with A-E for another week since she really likes those ones so far!

I have decided to start "home school" with Riley.  Now before you jump to any conclusions (like I used to do when I heard the words "home school," hear me out.  It's actually pretty cool.  First of all, Riley is only 16 months old, so pretty much everything will be play-based.  It's not like we're sitting here drilling her on ABC's and filling out workbooks.  Yeah right.  Basically it's just playing with her, guided by a theme each month (which I will choose). I might change it to two themes a month if we run out of activities or if she loses interest, we'll see.  It's really all going to depend on Riley and what she's interested in at the moment.

SO... we started a little (or very) late this month, but for what's left of it, our theme is "Halloween".  Here's just a little peak into what we're doing with our Halloween theme.  I started by clearing all the junk out of Riley's toy shelf, and replacing it with things I picked to go with the theme, as well as some of her favorite non-Halloween related toys.  Here's what her shelf looks like when she wakes up in the morning:

I basically took a ton of her toys out and put them away.  She had so many toys out, that her "playing" really just involved taking them all off the shelf and making a huge mess, but not really PLAYING with much of anything.  Some things I left are obviously not Halloween-themed, and I left them because (a) she loves them and (b) they are good toys for learning.  Things like the puzzles, the stacking blocks, the truck shape sorter, and the geometric stacker. Oh and her beloved flash cards.  Those will probably stay out for quite a while.

Now for the fun stuff.  HALLOWEEN THEME!!
BOOKS:  All centered around Halloween.  Riley usually prefers to read the same old books over and over, so I wasn't sure what she'd think about these, but she actually liked most of them!  Here's what we got (from the limited selection at the library this close to Halloween) Normally I would get more, but there's only a few days left in the month, so I only got 6:

Surprisingly she likes all of them, except the "One Witch" one, she's not really into it. Normally she takes a while to warm up to new books, but she let me read all of these with her!

SONGS:  I'll be honest, I didn't know a single Halloween song.  But thanks to the lovely internet, I now have quite a few.  Best part?  The ones I learned are basically just new lyrics to common tunes, so pretty easy.  And since she knows the tune, she likes the songs!

POEMS:  I have a bunch of Halloween poems/rhymes to read to Riley.  She's generally not really that interested in poems and nursery rhymes, but I want to get into the habit of reading her rhymes and it's a pretty easy thing to do, so we'll see how it goes.  Reading nursery rhymes and poems to your kids is great for language development, so in the future I'll share some of what Riley likes just in case anybody is interested.  She likes them a lot better if they have some sort of action to go along with them.  Here's an example (you can use your fingers as the "pumpkins":

ACTIVITIES:  This was a little bit tricky, but also really fun to try and come up with things to fit the theme.  What Halloween "activities" could we do?  Here's what I came up with:

(1) Halloween "treasure basket."  This is meant to be a Halloween themed sensory basket, so lots of things that are fun and different to touch- includes leaves, spider web, Halloween erasers, ribbon, spiders, tomb filled with confetti, mini pumpkin pencil toppers, rubber skeleton, a random pine cone or two... She LOVED the spider web, and loved trying to get all the spiders out of it.

(2) Halloween color sorting- I already had an orange and a white trick-or-treat bucket, so we went with that and filled each bucket with its respective colored items.  I didn't want to spend any money, so I searched the house and found everything I could that fit the color theme, and stuck it in the basket.  So we're clearly working on orange, black, and white.

(3) pumpkin seed sensory bowl- we're going to try playing with pumpkin seeds this weekend at our pumpkin carving party, and see how that goes.  I think this time I'll give her some different sized cups or bowls and some spoons and see what she does with it.  Maybe a water bowl as well so she can drop the seeds in there if she wants? 

(4) Making pumpkin bread from scratch- this is our activity tomorrow morning after breakfast!  We're going to make pumpkin bread and she gets to help measure, pour, stir, and then do the dishes with me!  And of course EAT the deliciousness!!

(5) Orange balloons!  Good for learning colors, and for comparing sizes (4 different sized balloons), but mostly just good for throwing and kicking and shouting "boons boons boons" over and over again!  Also, very good for covering with stickers!  (please excuse the pants-less baby, it was almost bath time).

OUTINGS PLANNED
(1) Halloween Day at the zoo- SO excited for this one, we're going on Saturday!
(2) Trick-or-treating!  There's an awesome neighborhood by our apartment that has great decorations and lights and is super kid friendly, so I can't wait to check it out with Riley.
(3) Halloween children's parade on Monday- hurray for another excuse to put on her Halloween costume!
(4) San Jose Children's Museum- tomorrow with Grandma (not Halloween related I don't think...)
(5) We carved pumpkins once already, and we'll be doing it again at a pumpkin carving party on Sunday!

Now just because we pick a theme doesn't mean we don't do other "normal" stuff.  We do.  In fact, Riley's favorite thing that I just made for her?  Totally not Halloween related at all.  And total cost? $0.  I took a container of puffs, cleaned it out, and filled it with straws that we already had.  Minimal effort, literally HOURS of fun for her.  She takes the straws out, puts them back in.  Piles them up, carries them around, chews on them, blows through them, the list goes on...

Sooo that pretty much sums up our Halloween theme work!!  I'm loving having an excuse to do some new and creative things with Riley, and she seems to really be enjoying it too.  Next month we will probably have two themes I think- first "transportation" (think cars, trains, trucks, planes, bikes, etc) and "Thanksgiving," although I think the Thanksgiving theme may really revolve around turkeys, as I don't think pilgrims and such will be all that exciting for her, but who knows.  Maybe Indians?  I don't know yet, we'll see.

Also?  Riley turned 16 MONTHS OLD today, so stay tuned for 16 month update coming tomorrow.