Leaf Week in Kindergarten

Great fun this week again with Kindergarten but this time with leaves.  Courtney and Claire got into this topic more than in past weeks.  I'm guessing it has to do with how much reading, discussing, crafting etc we did around leaves.  I can easily say that the nature walk to collect leaves was the twins' favorite activity.   We will be taking nature walks much more often.  We had to literally hunt for leaves but we were able to fill about half of one bag.

We studied, sorted and created with our leaves.  After reading The Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert,  Courtney wanted to make her own leaf man and bear.  Claire chose a self portrait.

Courtney wanted to keep making more!

Look how fabulous it turned out.

Here are a few more of our leaf activities.  Caroline is also completing a Leaf Lapbook to wrap up this study.  I'll post that over the weekend hopefully.

Leaf painting

Leaf prints

I think that this week we read more books than in the previous weeks.  It rained so we felt like doing more reading and cuddling on the couch.  We gathered so many leaf books from the library that I may have overdone it.  The list below includes only the favorites....requested again and again.

The Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert

Look What I Did With A Leaf by Morteza E. Sohi (especially for creating leaf people and animals)

Leaves by David Ezra Stein

A Tree is Nice by Marc Simont

Fall Leaves Fall by Zoe Hall

Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf by Lois Ehlert

Leaves! Leaves! Leaves! by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace

...and the absolute, all time favorite book this week...that I need my own copy of is...

The Tale of Three Trees (retold) by Angela Elwell Hunt.

Our reading time is also going well.  I'm still not certain that the reading portion is meeting Caroline's needs so I'm looking into how I can better supplement.  I've been adding reading activities into her workboxes, having her read to me from her Playful Pals books and just playing some phonogram games.  Last year we did most of Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons but I stopped so we could follow MFW K's reading plan.  I will continue to follow that but I'm really hoping to purchase Spell to Write and Read as soon as it's in the budget.  I'll also use it for Calista's spelling.  I never purchased Spelling Power since my plan was to get the Spell To Write and Read.

A few photos from our reading activities this week.

Caroline drawing objects that start with the letter L.  She then writes the word under each drawing.

Caroline working with some sight words.

We're packing up the leaf books, going to the library and moving onto apples next.