I took a walk that night and collected leaves from the neighborhood. My thought was to start with the idea of discussing leaf color. It is the season!
We spent meeting time using our senses to describe the leaves I found.
"They feel fluffy."
"It is as smooth as my pants."
"I see lines in it."
"This leaf is soft in the middle and starts to get crunchy at the tips where it is brown."
"It smells good like outside and I like the smell of outside."
"It kind of smells like apples."
From there we discussed my idea of sorting the leaves by color. As soon as I mentioned my idea, someone asked me about making a rainbow. A big rainbow! As big as our rainbow table! We went to work sorting leaves. After looking at them as a group, we saw there were mostly 8 colors. The leaves started with green, then yellow, orange, red, and brown. How did they do this? What made them change color? I started the conversation of trees preparing themselves for winter, so the packages that create the green color (chlorophyll) we see start to break down. This can be easy to see in the patterns around the edges of the leaves. This will take more conversation as time goes on, but there is a "kindergarten friendly" explanation here.
During our sorting process we found leaves like this. How did this happen? What made them like this? We put them in a separate "I don't know" pile. Leaves like this provide examples of unique color changing to explore sometime later.
After sorting we realized we needed more colors. Our yellow pile was full, but our light green and light orange was pretty empty. We went on a hunt. We knew from experience that our playground was full of leaves so we started there. Outside we found many brown leaves. It was a lot harder to find what we needed. We ran around and searched each corner. At one point, there was a gust of wind and the leaves came to us!
We spent meeting time using our senses to describe the leaves I found.
"They feel fluffy."
"It is as smooth as my pants."
"I see lines in it."
"This leaf is soft in the middle and starts to get crunchy at the tips where it is brown."
"It smells good like outside and I like the smell of outside."
"It kind of smells like apples."
From there we discussed my idea of sorting the leaves by color. As soon as I mentioned my idea, someone asked me about making a rainbow. A big rainbow! As big as our rainbow table! We went to work sorting leaves. After looking at them as a group, we saw there were mostly 8 colors. The leaves started with green, then yellow, orange, red, and brown. How did they do this? What made them change color? I started the conversation of trees preparing themselves for winter, so the packages that create the green color (chlorophyll) we see start to break down. This can be easy to see in the patterns around the edges of the leaves. This will take more conversation as time goes on, but there is a "kindergarten friendly" explanation here.
During our sorting process we found leaves like this. How did this happen? What made them like this? We put them in a separate "I don't know" pile. Leaves like this provide examples of unique color changing to explore sometime later.
After sorting we realized we needed more colors. Our yellow pile was full, but our light green and light orange was pretty empty. We went on a hunt. We knew from experience that our playground was full of leaves so we started there. Outside we found many brown leaves. It was a lot harder to find what we needed. We ran around and searched each corner. At one point, there was a gust of wind and the leaves came to us!
We came back and sorted more. I carefully measured paper to cover the rainbow table and get the right shape. We made a plan to make lines on the paper as a guide and a chart was made to help us when we were ready to glue. The "leaf rainbow" was not like a normal rainbow you see in the sky. This rainbow shows us the way leaves change color. Starting out with green, they turn yellow, red, and then turn crunchy and brown.
Following the guide, we got to work.
During this process we got a chance to take a close look at leaves. We have started on a reference for colors, shapes, and general make-up of the common leaves we might see in our neighborhoods. This time we categorized by overall color. What about sorting by leaf size? Shape? Amount of veins? Stem length? And what are the purposes of each attribute? There are many things to talk about when it comes to the world around us and simple things like a leaves.
Go on a walk through your neighborhoods and take advantage of the great learning opportunities in nature!
What a great idea! And yes, of course, it worked. Emma told us we had to go to the park this weekend to collect leaves for school! She did a great job of finding them and working with Landon on them. Thank you once again Miss Sarah!
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