Back with another fun, math focused fall flannel! Just look at these lovely leaves:
Pattern: available from Ashley Hughes
Oh the possibilities! Notice the varieties in leaf size, type, and color. Lots of opportunities for math talk!
Here’s some questions I might ask, depending on the age of my group and how I set out the leaves:
- How are these leaves the same?
- How are they different?
- Which leaf is the biggest?
- Which leaf is the smallest?
- How do you know?
- Which leaves do you think fell from the same tree?
- Why?
I might do a counting down rhyme or song and pause to compare groups:
- How many leaves do you see above on the tree?
- How many leaves do you see below on the ground?
- I wonder if there are more leaves above on the tree, or more leaves below on the ground?
- How can you tell?
- Let’s count!
I might focus on counting and sorting by attribute (in this case, color) and ask…
- Which color do we have the most of?
- How could we find out?
- Let’s sort all the leaves into piles by color!
- Which pile is the biggest/has the most leaves?
After a little math talk, we might play a hide and seek game. I like to play this game with a squirrel puppet after reading The Busy Little Squirrel. My squirrel puppet is hungry for a winter snack, but can’t remember where he buried his acorn. Oh no!
“Acorn, acorn, where could you be?
Are you buried under the RED leaf?”
(repeat with other colors or attributes – e.g. big/medium/small, pointy/wavy, etc.)
_____
Credit: original
If we read Leaf Man, I like to put out the leaves and let the kids play and make their own leaf shapes. Can you guess what this was? (Hint: it has long feathers and lives in the zoo…)
I still need to round it out with some brown leaves and I’d like to make my ash leaves a little smaller than the maples, but I LOVE the versatility of this set! We’ve had fun returning to it in many different ways this fall. 🙂
Storytime in the Stacks 