Exploring seasonal changes outdoors is a great way to enhance learning within your classroom!
Over the past couple of weeks my neighbor’s leaves, just down the street, have have been changing colors but my leaves have stayed green as ever. Â Finally, the leaves on our trees have started to turn colors too and we took full advantage of that today…
Using a Book for Inspiration
We started our day by reading the wonderful children’s book, “We’re going on a Leaf Hunt” by Steve Metzger…
This book follows the traditional story line of “Going on a Bear Hunt” only the children in this simple to read book find different types of trees with different kinds of leaves as they hike through the forest…
Expanding on the Book
After reading our book, I had the children gather around our table to talk about the different colors of paper we had spread around the table and then explained to the children that as we go outside for our own leaf hunt, they need to see if they can find a leaf for each color on our table…
Exploring the Colors of fall Outdoors
And then, just like the children in the book did, we went for a leaf hunt in our own “forest.”…
Each child brought with them a paper bag to collect their leaves….
Collecting Items in Nature
It is so funny to me as to which leaves the children will choose to collect. Â Some of the children really do seek out what I would describe as “pretty leaves” and other children will come running up to me all excited about the smallest, curled and dried up, brown leaf on the ground – but since brown was a color on our table – into the bag it went!…
I also collected leaves along our walk. Â I would often stop when finding what I happen to consider a “pretty” red, yellow, orange, or green leaf and say, “oooh, I found a nice big red leaf! This often got the children searching around to try and find a red leaf too…
I mean after all, I really hoped to come back to preschool with our bags filled with something besides all brown leaves! Â So we continued our hunt all through the forest for leaves of all colors, shapes, and sizes and along the way, the children did begin to pick up leaves of different colors…
Sorting Leaves by Color
When we returned back to our classroom, the children began dumping out their leaves then sorting them onto the colored construction paper by color…
The children did an excellent job sorting the leaves by color. Â This was no easy task because the children often had to decide whether a leaf was more orange or more yellow or more red. Not every leaf had fully turned into one complete color…
But soon, all the leaves were sorted by color and we took a few minutes to review and admire all of the colors and the leaves we found…
And then…
Well, I will wait and share in my next post! But Mrs. Courtney took this photo of our “forest” I thought I would just throw in here because I think it is kind of cool…
Available on Amazon