Bright Leaves
Originally Published October 15th, 2022
We shifted focus from seeds and fruits this week to the bright, bold leaves falling everywhere in our world as the trees around us stop making food for themselves and go to sleep for the winter.
This week was a brief focus and celebration of leaves, their colors, shapes, textures, and next week we will shift from leaves into thinking about the whole tree.
On Tuesday we read Going on a Leaf Hunt, and had a leaf observing, identifying discussion, and then did a cooperative group leaf sorting activity.
On Wednesday we raked up a big leaf pile at school in the morning and enjoyed jumping in it and buried ourselves. In the forest we read Leaf Jumpers and talked about leaf colors. Then we hunted for leaves by color and made a leaf rainbow.
On Thursday we had such a busy and engrossing day of child led learning with leaves. We had circle and read a sweet book called Leaves, about a young bear observing and caring about the trees through a seasonal coming and going of leaves. I had made some fun plans for cooking and a craft, but we pretty much scrapped those as the creative play that the children came up with for themselves involving leaves took over. They discovered that they could pour leaves from the big jumping pile into the playhouse through the open roof. Some people wanted to pour leaves in, some people wanted to sit inside and be under the falling leaves, it was fun all around. We tried to see how many leaves we could fit in there, and how deep it would get inside. It was so engrossing that they didn't even want to stop for snack, and then after snack they went back to it and went around the yard with the big metal bucket, filling it up with leaves from other areas of the play yard to continue to fill the house. There was much cooperation, communication, negotiation and sharing of creativity and purpose. Everyone was motivated to work together and all of our human strengths of creativity, cooperation and communication were beautifully on display.
It was so exciting and productive to them, that there was no question but that we adults needed to make time and space for it. In one of my first early childhood jobs, my mentor explained to me that 10% of what she did was planning, 10% was delivery, and 80% was cleanup. This is pretty much true as I've found, but there is also an important element to planning and delivery, where we observe and react to what the children are doing, see what is grabbing their interest, and prioritize holding space to accommodate their own ideas as much as possible. So we didn't cook anything as a whole group this week, but we had a lovely learning experience all the same and definitely did some important exploration and sensory discovery with leaves. We also went on a leaf collecting walk and made beautiful "leaf windows" out of wax paper and the leaves that we found.
