Learning with Leaves by Dianne Wilton

Autumn! Each year we’re in awe of the brilliance of nature, no matter how many times we experience this colorful transformation from green to deep red, vibrant orange and dazzling gold. The motivation for learning is just outside our door, welcoming our whole family to explore and discover. Here are some ideas to extend our experiences and to keep learning meaningful and fun as we play in the leaves.

1. Collect autumn leaves.

This treasure hunt is a special experience for everyone from toddler to grandparents. It’s the shared discovery and organization of leaves of different colors, shapes, and sizes, leaves with serrated or smooth edges, and leaves with deeply indented or gently curved borders. Your youngest child may decide to group the leaves by color or shape on large posters while his sister arranges them in banners to show vein patterns and grandpa lays them out on his cardtable according to edge details. Respecting everyone’s category choices allows us to appreciate and to become even more aware of fine details and differences and to see the leaves from new perspectives.

2. Make a cooperative leaf reference booklet.

Everyone can contribute to a selection of leaves to press overnight between several layers of newspaper under a heavy book. Then, tape or glue each leaf onto its own sheet of heavy paper. Compare your leaves with an identification guide (internet of library research), and have the artist of the family label them. The pages can be protected with plastic wrap or laminate or clear mactac, and bound together with punched holes and bark strips or twine. Your leaf reference booklet will be a permanent resource for your family’s library and can be extended as more leaves are identified.

3. Enjoy sensory walks, becoming attuned to the sounds, textures, and smells of the leaves of autumn.

Savor the “crunch” or “crackle” of dried leaves underfoot, the “whistle” as the wind whips through, the “rustle” of a chipmunk scurrying through the raked-up pile. Blindfold yourself and hold hands with a friend, experiencing the dry brittle leaves, the jagged or smooth edges, the fragility of the leaf blade compared to the hard firmness of the raised veins. Smell the mould of damp leaves, the tang of evergreen needles, the pungency of the wet earth in the garden. Collect your sensory words on separate file cards for an ongoing word bank, a wonderful source for creative poem writing or descriptive stories.

4. Compare the vein patterns of different leaves.

Recreate their designs by placing a light sheet of paper over the leaves, rubbing the surface lightly with a wax crayon. This is a perfect opportunity to study the water and nutrition pathways in leaves and plants. You can simulate this action by placing a freshly cut stalk of celery in a glass of colored water to show how water moves up the plant to nourish each leaf through its vein structure.

5. Enjoy the art of stained glass.

Arrange your favorite leaf shapes on a sheet of wax paper and sprinkle crayon shavings (shred with a scissor blade or an old grater) around the leaf. Place another piece of wax paper over this, cover with a cloth and iron it. The wax will melt to create a beautiful stained glass panel. Your children may want to make an even more interesting display by cutting the panel into a leaf shape after it has cooled, then hanging it in front of a window to let the sun shine through the colors. Older children may want to research the molecular movement of melting, changing from a solid to a liquid, as they add heat to the wax.

6. Leaf Math.

Young children will enjoy playing with these colorful “manipulatives” while they count, match, arrange by size or add or subtract. They can graph the leaf types or work with symmetry. Older children love to work with big numbers and they will be big with their estimations of the number of leaves they raked that morning (taking time to count the leaves in one wheelbarrow) or how many leaves are on the entire tree, counting the number on one branch outside their bedroom window.

7. Compose rhythmic rhymes as you rake leaves together.

Piggy-back onto favorite nursery rhymes or songs, creating your own autumn poems. From “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, your song might become “Autumn leaves are falling down, falling….” Not only will the raking be easier, your children will be learning about rhyme and rhythm and having fun with poetry.

8. Fall into fall as you delve into the dictionary, searching for homographs that are pronounced the same and are spelled the same but have different meanings.

“Fall” and “leaves” will give them a start. Taking turns, use one meaning of the word in a sentence and challenge the rest of your family to use that word in a whole new way. Enthusiastic word players may also want to search for homonyms, words that sound the same, have a different meaning, and are spelled differently. (currant, current; beech, beach; vein, vain) Your children may want to create illustrated banners or mini-booklets or develop their own games as they play with words.

9. Spelling opportunity pops up in leaves, too, as we gather words that form their plurals by changing the “f” to “v” before adding “es”.

Your family will have fun making the longest list they can – leaf, wolf, calf… It’s fun to write your words on leaf shapes to build a huge leafy tree for your door. Some of you may even want a branch with exceptions to the rule!

10. From earth to earth.

Nobody fertilizes a forest---fallen leaves feed the soil. You can encourage your family to do the same. Rake up small leaves right onto your garden and run the mower over larger leaves to shred them before spreading. Rake the leaves about 10cm. deep, leaving space around plant stems and trees. Most of your leaves will become soil by spring, just as nature intended.

Your child will come up with more leaf ideas---from mosaics to math. Have fun as you experience and extend the delights of autumn with renewed exhilaration and lots of learning. Enjoy expressing your new ideas, inspired by the description of author Albert Camus, “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”

About the author:

Dianne Wilton lives in a small community in British Columbia, Canada. She is the mother of two boys and the author of The Kitchen Table Classroom. You are invited to visit her website at: http://ktclassroom.tripod.com for fun free learning activities every day.She is dedicated to keeping the fun in learning.

About the book, Kitchen Table Classroom: You have taught your children more than half of everything they will ever learn by the age of 5, and you definitely know your children better than anyone. You have their interests at heart, more than anyone else. And you can do it! I am going to fill you in on "how" children learn, "how" to put it into action, "how to teach the basic subjects" and "how" to integrate all subjects into a theme. But the most important "how" among them all will be . . . "how" to have fun with learning! By bringing more learning fun into your home, you can do just that!

Visit Dianne’s web site for more information and for free email newsletters and tips!
http://ktclassroom.tripod.com