Ll -Leaf

It was kind of challenging learning about leaves before fall is really here. A few of our leaves are just starting to change colors, but most are still attached to the trees. This lesson would have been so much better if we could have raked up a big pile and jumped in them (one of the girls favorite things to do in the fall.) We did manage to find enough fallen leaves to do our activities and Boo learned the letter Ll so I guess it all worked out fine.

Our words to remember and Bible portion of this unit was "I will live and grow in Jesus." On Monday we picked a single leaf off of the big tree in our backyard. This leaf didn't want to be part of the tree anymore, but thought he would be better off on his own. We took our leaf inside and watched him all week. By Friday he was withered and brown. Jesus is the tree and we are the leaves. If we remain in Jesus we will live and grow spiritually, but we can not live apart from Him. "Those who do not belong to the Son of God do not have life." 1John 5:12.

Even though it was "slim pick-ins", the first thing we did was hunt for leaves around the yard.





I found a free download for leaf identification cards
HERE , so we used these to try to sort and identify our leaves.

We read "Autumn Leaves" and "Fall leaves Fall!" to learn a little bit about why some leaves turn colors and fall off trees every year. 

For our tactile letter activity Boo made the letter "Ll" with Play-Doh. I love crafts, but there's just something about Play-Doh that makes want to run the other way. Maybe it's the huge mess and the doh crumbs that I'm usually still cleaning up a week later. Anyway, I'm a mean mom and won't let my kids play with Play-doh very often. So this was actually a bigger deal to her than it looks! She actually cheered when she saw me get it out and I realized that in her almost 5 years she's only played with it a couple times...I know, sad!

We did a couple really simple leaf rubbings with our leaves, crayons and white paper. Then we read "Leaves! Leaves! Leaves! This is one that we own. I highly recommend this book when studying leaves with little ones. It's a cute story packed full of leaf info. It has a diagram of the parts of a tree, teaches how leaves make food, what makes leaves green, names of diff kinds of leaves, leaf jokes, a leaf poem and even has instructions for doing the leaf rubbing craft.

For our words to remember craft I found an idea similar to this on Pinterest. I thought that construction paper would be a lot less messy than painting the trunks, so we traced our hands and arm on to brown construction paper. Then we cut them out and glued them to our paint paper to form the tree trunk and branches. Then we used finger paint to make thumb print leaves on our trees.

Here's a link to a magic School bus episode we watched on YouTube after school one day. It taught about how leaves use the sun to make food for plants. It went perfectly with everything we've been learning.

The Magic School Bus Gets Planted

SIS HIGHLIGHT:

The highlight of Sis' week was making apple butter. For History we've been learning all about the colonial days using the American girl Felicity books and study guides. In book 2 we read about Felicity collecting apples to make apple butter with her mother in 1774. Although Felicity hated stiring the pots of apples, Sis thought it was lots of fun. She followed her recipe for apple butter, but it ended up being way too runny to be a spread. However by accident she ended up making the best tasting homemade cinnamon apple sauce ever. We refrigerated over night and the girls ate it all up the next day. Sis got a feel for what it felt like to be Felicity and had fun doing it, so in my book that's a success.