Autumn is such a great time of year for nature inspired crafts and learning. The world is full of so many gorgeous colors and the weather is perfect for getting outside and exploring. Here are a few of our favorite autumn themed crafts and learning activities: Autumn Leaf Math Count and Sort Leaves Take a nature walk around your neighborhood or yard and collect some autumn leaves. Then have your child sort and count them. Try sorting them in different ways like by color, by leaf type, by size, etc... Make a Graph Collect some different types of autumn leaves and then sort them either by species or color. Make a graph showing the amounts of different types of leaves that you collected.  Leaf Symmetry Activity Find a large leaf and carefully cut it in half, down one side of the center vein. Set one half onto a piece of paper and challenge your child to draw the missing half.  Autumn Leaf Science Autumn Leaf Color Extraction Activity   I love this one because the resul...

My 3 year old decided she wanted to be an autumn nature fairy for Halloween this year, so I set out to make her a pair of autumn themed fairy wings. We had recently used contact paper and some pressed autumn leaves to make placemats with neat autumn leaf art, so I thought I could try using a similar method to make some wings. After a little bit of trial and error, we came up with a method that worked and the wings came out gorgeous! Instructions: To make your own set of autumn fairy wings, you will need: - an old pair of costume wings (Dollar Tree wings work great) -clear contact paper -pressed dried leaves  -scissors -clear tape -gold glitter (optional) Before you can get started making your wings, you will need some autumn leaves. You can buy artificial leaves or collect your own outside and press and dry them inside a heavy book or with a flower press. It typically takes a couple days for the leaves to completely dry. We noticed leaves with really deep color...

A year ago today our lives were changed forever when the Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history, swept through and destroyed most of our little foothill community. If you haven't read my family's Camp Fire story already , you can read it here . Even a full year later, it still feels so surreal to me, like a bad dream I might eventually wake up from. While the rest of the world has moved on and shifted their focus onto other topics and other disasters, we living here, in and around the burn scar, are all still dealing with the aftermath of such enormous devastation.  Living through an event like this, seeing everyone you know loose everything, knowing how close you and everyone you know came to not escaping that day, changes you. It's a year later and I still wake up in the middle of the night, panicked, wondering where I am some nights. The tiniest bit of smoke in the air gets me throwing our belongings into bags, just incase ...