Autumn leaves naturally attract the attention of kindergartners and make for plenty of fun projects and activities to enhance fall lesson plans. You can use leaves for science, math, art and language arts lessons. To make the most of your activities, bring in plenty of library books about leaves for children to explore and expand their knowledge.
Art
For an introduction to leaf activities and an interesting wall mural, draw a large tree trunk on poster board. Allow students to tape leaves to the tree. You can use real or paper leaves.
Make fall-themed placemats by taping the corners of contact paper cut placemat-sized to a table. Remove the sticky backing and have students stick collected leaves to the contact paper. Seal with another sheet of contact paper.
No leaf unit would be complete with without a chance for students to do a leaf rubbing. Tape a variety of leaves to the table and give students unwrapped crayons in fall colors and white construction paper to make the rubbings..
Math
After going on a walk to collect leaves, have students sort the leaves by shape. Make a simple bar graph to show which leaves are most plentiful. Then do the same by color. With the collected leaves, have a measuring station set up. Have each student pick a leaf and then fill out a simple worksheet where the student measures each leaf with a ruler, unifix cubes or paperclips.
Science
Make a chart showing the different types of leaf shapes and which type of tree they grow on. Let students match leaves to the sheet and provide a magnifying glass so that they can closely examine the leaves, particularly the veins. Read a book about photosynthesis and autumn leaves and let children color a chart showing how leaves change color.
Language Arts
On a large leaf shape, create a classroom acrostic poem, with the letters L E A F. Write scrambled fall vocabulary words on leaf shapes and the unscrambled words on matching ones and let students match them. Use words such as the following: fall, autumn, leaf, stem, vein, green, red, orange.
Tags: contact paper, chart showing, collected leaves, have students, leaf shapes