Fall Fun!

Fall is here!  The leaves are changing colors, the days are getting cool, and pumpkins are everywhere!  It is my favorite season and I love to share my passion for fall leaves with my students!  I love to send my students on a fall leaf walk to collect leaves.  Then we press them for two weeks.   If you don't have a leaf and flower press in your classroom I highly recommend you get one.   Then we make things with the leaves...

I love the leaf creatures my students made last year.  We read this book to the kids first.  I also showed them lots of images of leaf collages on my iPad.  The kids had lots of inspiration and ideas to kick start their own creativity.  Then they set to work to make an animal or person using the leaves we had collected. 

This is a great book and is a good investment for your classroom library.  The leaf creatures were awesome!  I was impressed with the kids' ideas as well.  It was an open ended writing activity, the students told me their sentence and I wrote it on a 1" paper strip.  We read it together, then I cut it up, mixed up the words, and each student has to fix it up and glue it down.  This is a great Kindergarten literacy activity!

 
Some other great books about fall leaves to read to your kiddos are:

 

We also made some fun fall trees.  The kids used oil pastels to draw the trunks and then used cotton swabs to dot on the leaves using beautiful fall colors.  I just adore these!

I love the trees that have dramatic cascades of leaves falling.  So darn cute!

We also do a cute little poem,  The Leaves are Falling Down.  It can be sung to the tune of  the Farmer in the Dell.  We sing it together as a shared reading activity, then the kids do it themselves as a choice after jobs(centers) are completed.  It's simple and it helps  build confidence as readers when they do it independently. 

I hope these ideas will get your creative juices flowing for fun fall projects in your classroom!  If you are looking for more fall projects and ideas, check out my Pinterest board: Festive Fall
It is a great place to go for all things fall related for primary classrooms and families with young children.  There are lots of free printables, arts and crafts, fun food, and other ideas.
Happy fall!
Happy teaching!