Leaves {Freebie}

It’s a short week but we are trying to learn as much about leaves and trees as we can!

If you are like me, then you try to marry your science and social studies with your literacy time. Or maybe that’s just me and you all are a bunch of time efficient ninjas.

A book that I really like reading is one I got from Scholastic called Leaf Jumpers.

We read this first and then talked about the different colors we observe during Fall. We also talked about sentences and I wrote a few of the sentences from the book on the easel. We counted the words that were in each sentence and reviewed a skill we talked about yesterday which was “Sentences are made of words”.

It’s all just tying together so nicely 🙂

I gave each student a brown piece of paper that they had to trace their hand on. The goal was to get part of their arm in there so it looked like a tree instead of a bush. I also didn’t get a lot of pictures during this step because I was running around helping kids tape back on digits that accidentally snipped off. #scissorhappy

Once they traced their hand and cut it out, they got their sentence strips to cut. Click on the sentence strip to get a download that has six per page.

After they got their sentence strip, we arranged it to build the sentence. Have students mix up the words and find the word red, orange, yellow, and, etc… Then have them pull the word that starts with the capital letter and then a word that starts with an “o” or “y”. This is just a way to bring more awareness to the words in the sentence. Then, students rebuild the sentence by gluing it to the bottom of a piece of construction paper. The hand tree goes above that.

Then, I gave students small pieces of construction paper to create tear art. The book talks about how leaves come in many different sizes and shapes. It’s also good fine motor the smaller they tear.