Faking Fall

The calendar says it's Fall, and we really want it to feel like Fall, so we fake it around here. I noticed last week that every elementary teacher had fall leaves or pumpkins displayed in their windows. However, if you look at the trees, they are still mostly green. Nonetheless we had leaf day on Friday. Children were encouraged to find a fall color leaf, but green constitutes a fall color around here, so we allowed that too. A few children actually managed to find brown or yellow leaves, and we also had some interesting shaped green ones (some that were really soft).

Here are a few pictures from leaf day. First we went on a leaf hunt. Then we worked with our table groups (because then it is less obvious who found more/fewer leaves, plus cooperative learning is good) to sort our leaves, and then turn them into graphs by color
and by shape.
We did some scientific leaf observations with real leaves, and used magnifying glasses to look more closely at leaf veins. We had a few nicely colored leaves someone's Grandma sent from Michigan a few years ago.
Then we got a little sillier and wrote fictional leaf stories. Once finished, everyone got a turn to stand up and read their story to the class.
This was probably the favorite activity: we climbed up the 'tree' and dropped some leaves on a target. Well, we tried.
And after each child dropped 3 leaves, we had a total of 4 leaves touching the target. It was a fun game, even if it was a lot harder than it looked.
After the game we cleaned up, recited our Leaves are Falling poem and threw some leaves in the air.

Happy Fall!