Autumn Adventures with My Little Reader!

It was such a beautiful day here today! Isaac and I went on a walk, and it turned into a bit of a nature hike.

We were crunching through the leaves, and then began finding some pretty ones!

We decided to take them home with us.

Isaac was particularly excited about this one.

We got home and found a book all about leaves to read (Lois Ehlert's Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf).

Isaac compared the leaves in the book to some we found on our walk.

He really like the leaf shaped holes in the illustrations.

Then we talked about how leaves fall from the trees. Here's Isaac being a tree and making some leaves fall.

And here he is comparing some leaves.

Then after dinner, we got out the felt board and played with some soft, colorful leaves.

Learning Something New

Nonfiction is the theme for this month, and we are discovering all that we can learn from books. Our focus with this unit is specifically on spring (and mostly gardening). This week we learned how to grow vegetable soup from Lois Ehlert's book Growing Vegetable Soup. 

A few fun notes:

• While re-telling last week's "The Tortoise and the Hare" I had one student ask me, "How do you remember that story?" What a great question. When I finished the story, I gave a quick explanation of how I do storytelling without a book.

• I love that my students took notice during our activities of how yummy the vegetables smelled, especially the green pepper. (O.K. those are really fruit, huh?)

• Note to self: buy potting soil, not top soil next time. Top soil smells like poop! So gross!

Leafman

This week we read Leafman by Lois Ehlert. I had somewhat mixed reactions to this story from the children. I thought the illustrations in this story would really intrigue all the children, and they did intrigue most of the children, just some more than others. There wasn't as strong of a general reaction as I had anticipated.

The group dynamic was a little different in some of my classes this week. We were in a different classroom than usual on Monday due to Columbus Day. And there were a lot of students absent this week, which makes the dynamic in class different.

The kids all did really well with interpreting the illustrations in this week's book. They understood what was being created with the leaves in the illustrations, and understood that the creatures in each illustration were in fact created with leaves. They thought that was pretty cool.

I wish I had brought a fan with me to class this week, so we could talk more about the wind and do some demonstrations with blowing the leaves across the room. Something to remember for next time...

Re-reading last week's story was great because the kids remembered the simple text and read along with me. The best was when one of the children said, "I hear a peacock yelling at me" (recalling from the text). And then another child corrected him and said, "it's not 'yelling' it's 'yelping'!" These kids don't miss a beat!

Another funny moment this week was when we were reading a page in Leafman that mentioned geese, and one little boy told me how he has seen "geeks" before. He told me there was a lot of "geek poop" in his yard from all the "geeks." Too funny!

Here are some photos of the leaf creations of a few of my students. A couple of them actually took my book and used it as a reference for their leafman pictures they made, and they did an amazing job of recreating the leafman from the book! Check it out!