Talking About Fall When It Isn't Fall at All

I had a little bit of a strange lesson with the Little People yesterday.  You see, this week is "Fall" week - and yesterday we had a high here of 103.  It seemed that every point that I was trying to make about fall I had to negate.  For example, I would say:

• In the fall, the days get cooler - but here where we live it's still really hot.
• We start wearing long pants and jackets in the fall - but now we're still wearing shorts.
• In the fall, the leaves turn different colors on the trees - but we won't really see that until November here.
• In the fall, many birds fly to a warmer place, because they don't like it where it's cold - but here the birds are pretty happy - because it's so hot here.
• Thank goodness we could still talk about apples and pumpkins being ready to pick, and we could talk about fall sports - except those sports at our school that get cancelled periodically because the air gets so bad when it's warm like this...

After a whole lesson on this, I had to start asking myself why I even tried to teach the kids about fall when it really isn't fall at all.  I had to remind myself that sometimes I have to let go of my regular ideas (such as the one that says that October is when fall should be happening) and go with what the Little People know...and experience.

So, next year I think we'll talk about fall - in November.  And during the first week of October we'll talk about - air conditioning and swimming pools.