Celebrate National Sock Day

For some reason National Sock Day is coming up on Dec. 3, so let’s talk about some ways to celebrate at home or in the classroom.

Of course first off you need to declare it a silly sock day, and while mismatched socks are a classic for silly sock days, the point of National Sock Day (such that it can be said to have one) is to celebrate the pairs of socks that have stuck together.

Kids can design their own silly socks with this simple printable sock from My Cute Graphics, or use the sock coloring pages from Craft Corner DIY. It would be lots of fun to decorate the classroom with everyone’s silly socks!

The first sock-related book I think of is Fox in Socks, which is always fun to read aloud. Two Pink Peonies has a more Seuss-style printable sock if you like that better. Simply Love Coloring has coloring pages to go with the book. Your kids can sort rhyming words with this printable from Literacy Learn (I had to read the post to realize the words we’re rhyming with are fox and bricks).

Print up a bunch of colorful socks from My Party Design, hide them around the classroom/house and have kids find them and make pairs. Or do this with your mismatched socks and just go on a sock hunt! The Aristan Life has another printable sock matching game and I love that she added hanging the matched pairs on a clotheline (yeah for fine motor skill development!).

And if you’ve got real socks handy you can make some crafts with socks. Making sock snowmen is an annual tradition at my daughter’s school and you can learn how to make them from Art Beat. Or make this cute inchworm from an old sock with instructions from Woo Jr. Of course you can also make a classic sock puppet with this tutorial from Kids Activity Zone.

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

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