Since most of their questions had something to do with the colors leaves can be in the Fall I set out experiences to help them find out answers.
I lined up paper of every color and when we found leaves we glued them to the paper. We also mixed colors to try to match the colors of leaves.
I also set up an area where they could look closer at leaves and use art materials such as watercolors and Sharpie Pens to document what they noticed. I love combining art and science!
I set up an area where my sculptures could use clay to show what they noticed about trees.
We went outside to look closer and document what we notice about our beautiful Ash trees.
I also had an area for the kids to put things that have been falling off the trees lately!
I thought they would just look at them but they wanted to know what was inside so they broke everything apart! The Buckeyes were particularly challenging!
For fun toward the end I read Leaf Man and set out materials for the kids to create pictures out of leaves. Unfortunately I forgot to get pictures of their creations!
Our school also had a Family Fitness Hike at Cox Arboretum! What perfect timing!
During our hike kids were busy collecting our classes favorite leaves which were the Sassafrass (because they liked to say "sassafrass"),
Sweet Gum (because they were shaped like a star),
and Ginko leaves (because Ginko trees were around as far back as the dinosaurs and they thought it was cool that some dinosaurs actually ate Ginko leaves)!
When we were finished, we looked at our colored papers and were very surprised to find that purple was a color that leaves could become in the fall! Some of the Ash leaves on our playground even turned purple!
As our end project we painted a tree using only the Fall colors that we found leaves for....
and displayed it in the hallway.
We enjoyed looking closer together at the world around us during this beautiful Fall season! I enjoy discovering things right along side them!
Some other things going on in our room are:
-Learning lots of new sight words that keep popping up in our reading and writing! We are finding them in a lot of books!
-Retelling our favorite parts of stories in our Library Area,
-Writing riddle books where kids have to guess the hidden picture. The kids had to write one clue on the front.
This was an invitation to explore measuring our friends bodies to see how tall they were.
-Another teacher and I got our classes involved in a friendly rivalry between us before the Michigan/Michigan State football game. Our class learned the words GO and GREEN! (Amazing game, by the way!)
Many other things have been going on, but you will have to wait for the next blog post to find out!