Leaf Unit

 

Tiny and I read this book today. It has great information and goes through all sorts of trees and how the leaves look different. In the back there is even a page about where leaf color comes from, it even uses the chemical names like anthocyanin, so be prepared for that if you plan to read it.

We also read The Little Yellow Leaf. It is a story about a little leaf who is too afraid to fall off the tree. It nicely goes through several "milestones" of fall before the Yellow Leaf finds a Scarlet Leaf on the same tree and they decide to drop off the tree together.

 

To go along with these great books we did some crafts. I cut out a tree shape a glued it to a background page, and then Tiny put yellow leaves on.

 Here she is working on the second "Mommy Tree" after having completed the original "Daddy Tree" below.

For this project and others I have been letting her use the Creatology Glue Pens- she is holding one in the picture of her working. I love them. They contain liquid glue- which allows the glue to stay wet for long enough to work with, but have a sponge cap at the end- which limits the amount of glue that can be used. The sponge tip can be unscrewed for when larger amounts of glue are needed, like in a Calm Down Jar (which is why I originally bought these, sooo glad I couldn't find and regular clear glue that day).

Previously we have worked with glue sticks, but she can never finish her project before the glue she has put down dries. We've also used regular glue, but we had the usual problems of too much glue causing problems and making a mess. An additional bonus is that it is a cylinder which allows her to practice proper gripping skills. We are going to be getting these for a LONG time. They come in a pack of three pens, and I got them for less than $2 at Michaels!

Previously, we had gone out and collected an assortment of leaves and a couple days ago, we decided to sort and count them. See, Daddy is an engineer and is not fond of pictographs, being a former math teacher, and currently working on my master's in education, I don't see any reason in making things simpler than they need to be because adults think kids can't understand. Tiny had a great time sorting our selection of leaves by color and counting them. I then drew the bars, and you can see that she colored them. We even talked afterwards about how big rectangles mean lots of leaves and she told me that there were the most yellow leaves!  It's not something I expect her to do on her own, but it seems as good of an introduction to graphs as many others.--Daddy was very pleased with it when he got home too.

  Here is a shot from the first day of our Leaf Unit with a few of our books spread out and some light-weight foam oak leaf shapes. We sorted them by color (Tiny loves to sort and arrange things, I blame Daddy and his side of the family :p, though it only becomes a problem when she starts to rearrange displays at the store), and then worked on some patterns for the first time. She did pretty well with the concept of an ABAB pattern, and we tried and ABCABC pattern, but that was a bit too much. Then we used the colored leaves to make "picture patterns." 

We've got more days of leaves ahead!