Langauge Group Week of October 31, 2016

FALL HARVEST THEME

This week our language lesson for fall focused on the changing colors of leaves.   We used the book “Fall is Not Easy” by Mary Kelley which shows in simple illustrations how trees change during the seasons of winter, spring, summer, and fall.   The magic of the book is that in fall, this one particular tree just “can’t seem to get it right.”   Its leaves turn strange colors and  rearrange themselves to become ‘pictures’:   a yellow and black happy face; a rainbow; red and white stripes like a candy cane; black and white spots like a cow; etc.   The children were encouraged to predict what the tree’s next transformation might be, and to label what it actually  was.

 As a related activity, we created replicas of the illustrations of the tree’s transformations, made a tree trunk, and had the children take turns following directions to “find the one that looks like a hamburger”, for example, then place it at the top of the trunk.

Activities worked on during this lesson:

-listening and attending to a story

-making predictions

-labeling pictures

-identifying colors

-following directions that include embedded descriptive clauses

-waiting for a turn

Activities you can carryover at home:

-look at the clouds and ask your child to describe what pictures they see

-go out and collect a few handfuls of leaves to examine….talk about their colors and shapes and how they are the same or different

-make a leaf rubbing

-sing a leaf song (we’ve included a simple one for you)

Leaf Song (Sung to tune of “London Bridge”)

Leaves are falling all around

All around, all around

Yellow, orange, red and brown

To the ground.

Miss Linda and Miss Diane