Fall Curriculum, Day Four

Today’s activity will not use the leaves that you have collected. Instead, the children will be making leaves of their own.

Have the children choose the shape of leaf that they would like to use. Enlarge the leaf shape to fit onto a 9 x 12 sheet of construction paper and trace the leaves onto white construction paper (or have the children trace them if they are able). Have the students cut out the leaves; precut for students who are not physically able to manipulate scissors. Remember to work with your occupational therapist to find scissors that will work for students who have the potential to learn to cut-the world of scissors goes way beyond your average school safety scissors!

Once the leaves have been cut, let the students choose a painting utensil-this is another great time to use Boardmaker to make visuals*. Let each student choose the color of paint that he/she wants to use and paint the leaf. Once the leaves have dried, hang them on a classroom “tree” on the door or in the hallway.

Today, fill your sensory table with some sort of harvest-themed item-deer corn, bird seed, straw, Indian corn, small pumpkins, more leaves, etc. As an alternative to the sensory table, you could make fall-colored playdough and scent it with pumpkin pie spice, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, etc. (be sure to check for allergies…I have been hearing of more cinnamon allergies recently!).

A great science activity is to put some leaves in a plastic zipper bag. Find a nice, fresh leaf-not one that has dried out or gone soggy. Put one leaf in each bag and find several different places to put them-in the window, in the dark, on the counter, outside….take a picture of each leaf on the first day, then check back every few days to see how the leaf has changed. Hang the pictures of the leaves together and compare how different the changes are in the leaves that are hanging in different locations as well as how the leaves change over the day. If your students can, have them make predictions about what will happen and then compare their predictions to what actually happened.

*For art activities, I like to have a set of visuals for each child depicting each tool that would be used in art. This way, each child has a picture to exchange or use eyegaze to make a choice or a visual prompt to help them verbalize their needs. Some of the ones that I included were: paint, paintbrush, glue, crayons, scissors, paper, playdough. I kept them in an envelope with the child's name on it, then before school I would pick out the ones that were needed for the day and place them in a small (approx. 4" x 4") basket labeled with the child's name. The baskets stacked together and were easy to pull out and quickly pass out when it was art time; doing this kept the choices from becoming overwhelming to the students.