Homeschool Preschool Theme: Fall

This month ds4, my 4yo, is learning about all things Fall for his preschool.  We took one week off this month, so I made plans for 3 weeks worth of lessons, focusing on fall in general/leaves, apples, and Halloween.  We have both been having a lot of fun with this one! :)

For the first week we learned about fall and how leaves change.  First I made up a word wall with sentence strips about fall.

I got the pics and sentence ideas from Kinderplans.com.

Then we made a collage about the signs of fall.

Ds then ripped strips from construction paper to use as leaves for a tree.

We had a collection of leaves going from our Outdoor Hour challenges and used some to make splatter paintings.  Just dilute some paint in a spray bottle and "spray paint" some leaves on white paper.  Not only do you get pretty painted leaves, but a neat design left on the paper.

I printed up two outlines of a tree with limbs and ds finger painted green leaves on one and fall colored leaves on the other.  He cut them out and glued them together so we have "summer tree" on one side and "fall tree" on the other. :)

This is probably ds's favorite part of this week yet.  It's simply a counting game with fall leaves.  I drew a crude tree on a paper and we placed several cutouts of fall leaves on it.  Then we took turns rolling dice and counting off the number of leaves for the number we rolled on the dice.  Game is over when all the leaves are gone.  We played this simple game all morning!  So much so that he is beginning to recognize the numbers on the dice without having to count them out!  Fun, fun, fun. :)

Finally I found this book at the library, Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert.  We read the book and made our own version of a leaf man.  (Ideas from Kinderplans.)

First we added food coloring to water and used eyedroppers to make some pretty fall looking "paper" for our leaf man out of paper towels. 

I know by now you are all thinking that this boy owns no clothes. :P

Aren't they pretty?  I hung them up in my laundry room to dry.

Then he drew his version of leaf man on the paper towel art and cut it out and glued it on some construction paper.  Cute!  And see, he does have clothes. And a rockin' cute new haircut. :)

That wraps up the fall/leaves portion of our October theme unit for preschool.  This week...apples!