Take Your Children For A Nature Walk

I’m not sure where you are from, but here in Michigan the leaves have started to change color and it’s the time of year that I love taking my students on a nature walk for a variety of reasons. #1 As you might have guessed, is as a science exploration, #2 is to see our world in a mathematical way and finally #3 is to use our collections in art projects.

We collect leaves, then we sort and classify them. Which have pointy ends? Which have round ones? We have a tree book and we identify what trees the leaves came from.

I like to teach my children the vocabulary word chlorophyll at this time. I do this with my change bag magic trick. A change bag is simply that. Something goes in and something else comes out; it changes. We put a green leaf in. It’s filled with chlorophyll. We clap our hands and say: “It’s autumn. The leaves are no longer drinking chlorophyll.” And out comes a red, orange, yellow and brown leaf. Check out the link for my Magic Videos and see how you too can easily bring a touch of magic into your class room! You’ll grab your students’ attention and teach all sorts of science and math vocabulary via the “magic words”. I use it to introduce and teach a variety of subjects!

I do a simple “wow!” science experiment to show them how a plant “drinks” chlorophyll by purchasing a white carnation. Cut off a bit of the stem and place it in a clear glass cup filled with water that has been filled with 10 drops of green food coloring. The carnation will “drink” the water and actually turn green! My students are amazed.

Besides SCIENCE, I also collect the leaves to do ART. One is a lovely leaf rubbing. As you know I like to do at least one recycling project per month with my students. Reusing broken crayons is one for October. Peeling off the labels is a great fine motor skill and my students actually enjoy doing this! We do it through out the year, so I have a terrific supply for the following season. Send some home in a small baggie with a note as a “homework” assignment, or have children peel crayons when they’re in the Time Out Chair or as an activity when they’ve “Nothing else to do…”

Here’s how to make a crayon cake: melted crayon cakes

Pre-heat an oven to 250º
Break peeled crayons into smaller pieces.
Spray inside of regular or mini muffin tin with vegetable spray. I use Pam.
Put them in a regular or mini muffin tin.
Fill tin to the top, but not overflowing.
I mix the colors and have them all different colors except white.
I do make an all-white crayon cake to use on black or navy paper for winter “snow” rubbings or black and purple “ghostly” rubbings.
As oven temps vary, keep checking to see how long the crayons will fully melt. This usually takes 15-20 minutes.
Remove from oven and let stand ‘til cool, and solid.
Flip pan upside down and let gravity take over. They should plop out.
If they don’t, put in freezer for a few minutes and then try, or run the bottom under hot water, but not too long or the crayons will melt again.
I make a mini one for each of my students to take home, and a class set of large ones.

Oriental Trading sells great templates for leaves, or simply collect a supply of leaves. I tape the leaves and templates to a long table. Children lay a sheet of white copy paper over the leaf/template and rub the crayon cake over it. The raised lines will appear in the rubbing. I demonstrate how to move their paper and select another leaf/template and rub some more so they have a collage affect. They enjoy seeing their leaves appear.

fall leaf art project for kindergarten and first grade, nature face art project for kindergarten and first grade Another thing you can do is make a Nature Face. Do this as an in-class project, or better yet as a home-school connection and send a plate home with a small bottle of glue and give this as a memory-making homework assignment. Click on the link for my direction letter home and my two sample photographs! I blow up my students' school picture and glue that to the back of the paper plate with the caption: Kelli's (student's name) nature face, then hang them from the ceiling in the hallway! They make an awesome decoration as they twirl and spin. Each one is so unique and adorable!

leaf_book Making a leaf animal is also fun. Children select several leaves and glue them on a sheet of construction paper. I read the book: Look What I Did With A Leaf by Morteza Sohi before I do this activity so they can get ideas. My students love this book. I have them guess what the leaf creatures are. Because little ones are rough on the leaves with glue sticks and have torn them in the past, and they have not stuck, I have them use a Q-tip dipped in Elmer’s glue. I put the glue on small 8” paper plates. I let them add details like eyes and a mouth with a black flair marker. They really turn out quite cute. Some of them are "monsters" or "aliens" and that's OK too.

leaf_banner I've also purchased rubber and foam leaf stamps from various craft stores through out the years. I recently checked and they are harder to find, but Oriental Trading has them. Click on the link: Foam Stamps. I teach my students how to “Paint Stamp” which is also a great fine motor skill. I ask wallpaper and paint stores if I can have their old wallpaper books and most of the time they give them to me free. On some occasions they say they will cost $1 to $3 which is inexpensive since it’s a gold mine of huge paper that makes a cool background for a variety of art projects! I especially like the kind that is textured and not printed. It’s perfect for my “Leaf Banners”. Most of these types of “Decorator Stores” also sell draperies and have fabric swatch booklets too! They are also perfect to paint stamp on. Because they are cut with pinking shears they look great as a mini banner!

The best way to make sure you have enough paint on a rubber stamp is to PAT it on, not brush it on. Children then PRESS the stamp down and lift it straight up. My Y5’s are so good at this; they don’t even have to wear a paint shirt to work at the center, and rarely have to wash their hands! I do try to have an adult present to simply watch the table so children don’t get carried away stamping too many as they enjoy it so much, or mix stampers in the wrong color. Seeing how they place their stamps on the paper is interesting and many of them make a very unique design. Sometimes I’ll let them sprinkle on a bit of glitter on the wet paint for a shimmering affect.

If you don’t have foam stamps, you can do the same thing with the leaves that you’ve collected. Simply let the children brush paint on the leaf and then lay a sheet of paper on the leaf and have them gently rub over it with their hand, being careful not to move the leaf. They can paint more than one leaf, but they need to be careful when placing the paper so that they don’t place it on top of the leaf they already made. I suggest only painting two at the most. They will need to wear a shirt for this, as they will get paint on their hands. contact_paper_leaf_2

crayon_and_rip_leaf Another thing you can do with the fall leaves is to cut out an elm leaf shape and have each child choose 2 leaves and glue them to the leaf. I then put a sheet of contact paper over the leaf. The children press down on all of their leaves under the contact paper, then they trim around their leaf cutting off the excess contact paper. A bit of raffia tied on the end of the stem makes for a great finishing touch! On the back of this leaf you can have them rip and tear strips of red, yellow, brown, or orange paper to represent the colors of fall leaves and then glue them down, or you can have them use a crayon sharpener and sprinkle crayon shavings on their leaf. Cover with a piece of wax paper and then press an iron set on low for a few seconds. Peel the wax paper away and you have a cool affect.

fall art project, arm tree art project, keepsake art projects, Ripping and tearing paper is a super fine motor skill that I have my students do once a month. A great fall keepsake is to trace their arm and hand to look like a tree. Have them rip, tear and glue fall "leaves" to their tree. For more leaf activities click on the link for my Leaf Unit. and to view a selection of other photographs.

Finally, I take my students on a nature walk for MATH! We go on a Color Hunt, and identify colors that we see in English and Spanish and collect the colored leaves so that we can sort and count them when we get back. How many yellow, brown, red and orange ones did you find? We graph the results of our data. We also graph the results of which is your favorite colored leaf? Click on the link for a Leaf Graph.

While we are color hunting, we are also SHAPE hunting. There are lots of shapes in nature and we call out the geometrics whenever we see them. I have a clipboard and I keep a tally list as we go so that we can refer to it when we get back to the room. We count the sides to the shapes we see, we compare and contrast as we “spy”! How is the stop sign different than the traffic light? Etc. Click here for 6 Tally Time Shape Sheets

PATTERNS are another one of our report card standards so we’re checking for those as well. “I spy a flower pattern with that lady’s mums! She planted yellow, brown, yellow, brown ones!” When you get back children can make leaf patterns with stamps, or they can stamp a group or set of leaves. I cut out huge black oak, maple and elm leaves and let my students stamp a set with gold stamp pads. I put an equation on the board 5 stamps + 5 stamps again, 5 stamps + 5 stamps ='s 10 and then they stamp 10 leaf stamps and write the equation on the back. I have patterns and a poem for this activity in my Leaf Unit.

SYMMETRY is another vocabulary word I’ve taught my Y5’s. I include a “finish the picture” in each one of my units so that you can teach bilateral symmetry even at this young age. I simply draw a picture, cut it in half and show you only half of that picture. Children fill in the other half.

Leaves, people’s faces, are symmetrical. Cutting a leaf down the middle and then drawing the other half is a fun thing to do. Does anyone spy an animal? Most of them are bilateral! Click on the link to print some great “Keep-it-folded-and-CUT” Symmetrical Shapes.

If you want to do more patterning with your students click on the link for my Patterning Book, or if it's graphing you need, clink on the link for my Graphing Book.

How many parallels to math do you think you can find in the real world today? How can you bring science and art into your classroom and make it hands-on, more interesting and fun? I hope you’ve gained a few ideas from me, and if you have some to share, we’d love to hear from you!

No matter what, no matter where... go on a nature walk and just get out there!