Leaf Reading and Writing Activities

As kids go back to school it feels like fall even if it isn’t technically fall yet, and a great way to start the year or an early unit to have ready for when the leaves start to turn is activities having to do with leaves.

You can use these printable worksheets from Homemade Heather to talk about the parts of a leaf, photosynthesis, why leaves change color and log your own leaves from a leaf hunt, among other things.

There are writing activities involving leaves from Sunshine and Lollipops that you can download for free at Teach Simple. They include a creative writing exercise, a Venn diagram to compare two leaves, and other things to write about leaves you collect as a class, among other things.

Kids can draw and write about their own leaf with this writing activity from Yearn 4 Learning. I love the one shown above where the child turned the leaf into a bird.

Grab a set of printable leaf letters from Modern Preschool to use to decorate the classroom, help kids spell their names (or use for name cards at their desks) and other activities. And if you want to go full on leaf theme in your writing center, check out these leaf themed grammar and writing posters from Amazon.

I also love this fall leaf writing activity from Teach With Me. You can use leaf shapes and have kids write something or work on a list of things (what we love about fall, qualities of leaves, different kinds of trees, etc.) and hang them like falling leaves in the classroom.

There are tons of books written about leaves, and lots of activities you can do with them, such as:

Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf by Lois Elhert activities from Sounds Like Fun at Teachers Pay Teachers
We’re Going on a Leaf Hunt by Steve Metzger, leaf hunt printable from Primary Playground
Leaf Man by Lois Elhert unit study from Proverbial Homemaker

Need more fall themed literacy activities? Check out this post for literacy activities and this one for printable books with a fall theme.

With little kids especially, linking learning to physical activity really does help them learn. Movement can help kids focus, and it just keeps them from sitting still all day, which isn’t good for anyone.

The good news is lots of different learning activities can be adopted to get kids moving while they learn, so let’s look at some math and number activities that use gross motor skills.

Probably the most obvious thing would be hopscotch, which helps kids count while they hop. You can also mix up the numbers, do skip counting with the numbers, give kids a simple math problem and have them hop to the correct answer, and on and on.

This number hop game from Gift of Curiosity is a more chaotic version, with number flash cards on the floor that kids can hop, skip or jump to as you call them out (this one is more for individual number identification than counting). It’s a great indoor option if it’s too hot, cold or rainy out to do traditional hopscotch, too.

This painter’s tape number line idea from Days with Grey doesn’t involve quite as much movement, but kids can move around while they place things on the number line and work on learning about one to one correspondence. In the blog post they use shoes, but you can count anything you’ve got handy. (Be warned when I visited this website had an ad that continually took up the whole page, but you can get the idea pretty quickly.)

One of the important tasks of learning numbers is learning a parent’s phone number just in case it’s ever needed, or how to dial 911 in case on an emergency. Teaching Mama has a great way to practice telephone numbers and get some movement in with a giant telephone keypad made out of paper plates. You can also use this for counting practice, but it’s a great idea for learning phone numbers, too.

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