little illuminations: The Leaf Man and Fall Fun

Living in the south, it never fails that temperatures and seasonal themes often are askew. We had a cold snap (from the 90's to the 60's / 70's) for a couple of days. Sure enough, the morning we started our fall unit, temps were back in the 90's and it is sunny! Go figure! We are experiencing a few of the seasonal changes, but they are just beginning, so we have to really look hard to observe the onset of autumn.

Two of my favorite fall books are Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf and The Leaf Man both by Lois Ehlert. We took a nature walk and collected leaves and acorns.

We took some of our leaves and put them in our science center. My friend Addi used prisms to observe the leaves, then compared how the leaves looked in our microscope. I think I've got a little scientist on my hands!

After reading The Leaf Man, we made a few of our own.

We used this booklet from Little Giraffes for our leaf explorations. In the first few pages, we made leaf rubbings, measured our leaves with unifix cubes and dropped our leaves and counted how long it took for them to fall from to the ground. We measured the area of our leaves in pennies, and see how many pennies it takes to sink our leaf.

We used leaves in our play outside to make wonderful creations!

And painted a fall mural.

And finally, one of my favorite fall activities is to have the children trace and cut out their arm and hand on construction paper, then glue tissue paper leaves. No matter what the skill level, these always turn out so nice.