I’m happy to be able to participate in another Spotlight Saturday link up hosted by Kindergarten Dragons. This week I’m spotlighting finding and discussing signs of the fall, autumn season.
Fall is one of the prettiest seasons here in the northeast and I always love teaching young students about the fall colors and signs of the season. We start off talking about and listing things that the students already know about the season. Then, I like to show them a PowerPoint presentation that explains the fall season in very simple terms that they can understand and uses real, full-color photographs to which they can relate. Here are a few sample slides:
At the end we play a little game to check their understanding. I show them the following slide:
We look at each picture and they tell me whether or not it is something we would normally see in the fall. After their response I click on the picture. A smiley face shows for fall items, an unhappy face shows for items not seen in the fall.
The signs of fall pictures are then given gold stars to distinguish them from the rest giving students a visual aide.
After the group activity I check individual student understanding by having each student “hunt” for signs of fall.
I upload the PowerPoint onto our class computers and allow students to access it during group or free time. They enjoy looking at the pictures and doing the “quiz” at the end. If you would like to use this PowerPoint in your classroom it is available here.
The next day we review the signs of fall by reading the following emergent reader. It coordinates with the PowerPoint and uses fun, repetitive text along with full color photographs from the PowerPoint to review the signs of fall, autumn. I read it to the students first and then we re-read it together.
We review relevant words from the reader and place them on our word wall.
During our group times the students get to make their own copies of the emergent reader. I differentiate them according to students’ ability level. Some students read the words and color provided pictures. I am able to check their comprehension by how they color the pictures.
Other students read the words and draw their own pictures. I check their comprehension by the pictures drawn and the colors used.
The next day is our favorite! We take a walk/hike and look for signs of fall on our school grounds and playground. We take pictures of signs of autumn we discover and collect signs of autumn to bring back to our science center. Once we’ve returned to our classroom, we create a class book. Each student creates a page by drawing a picture of a sign or signs of fall and writing a sentence about it using the words from the word wall.
These pages are then bound together to create a class book which is placed in our reading center. Students can also “check it out” like a library book and take it home for one night to share with family and friends.
I use the Little Bird Tales app to create a class book using the photos we took on our fall walk.
