Autumn Leaves

As autumn is now upon us, I thought we could use the beautiful autumn leaves to learn about colours in a natural and meaningful way. So today the group of 3 to 5 year olds were introduced to four colours: red, yellow, orange and brown.



The aims of the session were for the children to be able to repeat and recognise four colours, do the actions for an autumn song and begin to sing the song with me.

I brought in a basket full of autumn leaves collected from the park next to the school. I let the children discover the leaves for themselves as they entered the classroom. We then looked carefully at the leaves together, held them and talked about their shapes, texture and colours. I explained to the group that today we were going to learn how to say four colours in English and learn a song about autumn.

I reintroduced the four colours using laminated leaves of different colours. We sorted the leaves and played a variety of games to listen, repeat and recognise the colours. We focused on the "ow" in brown.



I grabbed a handful of laminated leaves and let then fall to the ground the autumn leaves are falling down, I explained. I repeated this with a red leaf, a yellow leaf and orange leaf and a brown leaf; a red leaf is falling down etc Individual children followed instructions to do the same.

Can you be a tree blowing in the wind? The branches are swaying and the leaves are blowing gently in the breeze. The leaves are falling down. The children used their bodies as tree trunks, arms as branches and wriggling fingers as leaves. They swayed in the wind and then wriggled their fingers and lowered them down to the ground.

I sang a very simple autumn song (sung to the tune of London Bridge is Falling Down) a few times:

Autumn Leaves are Falling Down

Autumn leaves are falling down,
Falling down, falling down,
Autumn leaves are falling down,
red and yellow and orange and brown

We repeated the song and actions using coloured scarves.

I placed the leaves on the craft table and as the children coloured in their own leaves using oil pastels we sang the song together. I let The children chose which colours they wished to use. The veins were added in another colour and then the leaves painted over with a light green liquid water colour.

We repeated the song one more time before saying goodbye.

Next week we shall cut the leaves out and make some leaf crowns, then we shall present the song to their parents.

Main Language Aims:
Autumn vocabulary: autumn, leaf/leaves, red, yellow, orange, brown

sound: "ow" in brown

Other Aims
Bringing awareness to the changing leaf colours in autumn

Edited 5 October 2016:
here are some of the leaf crowns ready to be stapled together. We added red and gold glitter to the leaves too!