Leaves Leaves

I think I have finally recovered from the weekend…

I didn’t take a nap today during lunch so I think that means my body is coming back to life.

I am working on a Fall unit right now…which (let’s be honest) probably won’t be done til Christmas. I thought I would share this activity now because if I don’t tell you about it now….the ever shrinking brain of mine will forget about it and you will be left not knowing about all the leafy fun happenings.

I even let them paint (with q-tips but it counts).

Where I got this book, I will never know. It’s the size of a folded piece of paper hot dog style. I know you know what I mean. A  retired teacher must have left these books behind because I have a few of them. Cant’ say I’m mad about it, but they are ancient. 

If by some chance you don’t have your own assemblage of books from the 1980’s then may I suggest some other books that would go along with this activity 🙂

{I know that I got this one with my last Scholastic order. There were a few more in this series that we have read and they have been good.}

We talked about what we have been noticing as the season changes from Summer to Fall. They brainstormed until they said something about leaves changing colors. Before we had read the books I posed the question, Why do leaves change color in Fall?

Bingo. The question was formed and written on the board.

Now we narrowed in…stay on task people.

We read the books and gathered our information about leaves and why they change colors. I constantly (maybe 50 times…) reminded them of the question to stay on topic. Every now and again I would get an answer like “The leaves fall from the trees.” After the essential question for our lesson was posed, I would remind them of the question that we were trying to answer.

There is a whole-brain teaching technique (or so says the way smarter Kindergarten teachers on my team) when you do a big clap when they give their because. Side note: I am not WBT trained yet so I could be completely making this up. I have been watching some of the YouTube videos, but I am in no way trying to sound like I know what I’m talking about. {We all know that goes without saying…}

Here are some of their answers. This was really the first attempt to answer a big question and then write it down and I was really proud of them! They learned some big words {photosynthesis and cholorophyll} and I just let them push the sounds on their own. I think I walked by a kid at one point and  said, “Hashtag, impressed” out loud. #quit They painted their leaves with Q-Tips. I changed the one I have for you to be yellow instead of green. Not sure why I left one tree green. Also, on the new shiny one the colors are under the tree instead of over it. That seemed to confuse them {and by them I mean me}.

You live you learn. I had these copies left over from last year so you have the shinier newer version of it.

Like I said, this is part of the Fall unit I’m working on but we enjoyed it so much that I wanted to share. Grab it for free and enjoy!

I added the last page because we put our “I Can” statement in the hall to go along with the activity that we have out there. The days of just hanging up art work are o.v.e.r.

What is happening in your classroom this week?