Fall Leaves Lesson for Pre-K

Hello, Everyone!

It's Brittany again from Precious Steps Preschool! 

The first day of fall may still be five days away, but I'm totally feeling in the spirit of the season lately.  I've been enjoying my almost daily Pumpkin Spice Lattes, I have my potted Mums and Asters lining the border to my front porch, and my yard is starting to fill up with leaves, leaves, and more leaves!  Which is exactly what inspired today's post, and the newest product in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

 My girls love playing outside in nature. Making a simple leaf collage is a classic and a favorite!

And who doesn't love leaf rubbings? Just place leaves, bark, or hay underneath a piece of paper and color over top. It's so simple yet so satisfying to see those leaves come through!

This Fall Leaf Unit for Pre-K includes all the best Pre-K activities and is built around a Fall/Leaves theme.  It includes Morning Work, a Ten Frame Game, Letter Matching Activities, Leaf Graphing Worksheets that warrant a fun fall scavenger hunt, Sight Word Practice, Math Centers, and more!

My preschoolers have always LOVED cut & paste worksheets!  The colorful leaves really draws in their attention and the beginning of the school year is a great time to practice with scissors.  Aniston even asked if she could have an extra worksheet to cut out ALL of the leaves for her to use as Bingo markers.  Love the imagination of these kids!

We also love any excuse we can find to get outside, which is what made this Graphing Leaves worksheet so much fun to complete!  The kids got to run around collecting as many leaves as they could in five minutes or so, and then we took them back inside and graphed them by coloring in blocks on their leaf graphing chart.  Then, we used this corresponding Graphing Leaves worksheet to total how many of each color leaf was found, what color we found the most of, and what their favorite color was -- both individually and totaled up as a group.

A nice way to settle down after all the outside excitement would be to have the students work on this Morning Work assignment while you get ready for the next transition or activity.  The students will gain practice writing their names, drawing a tree, coloring inside the lines using realistic colors, tracing the word 'Fall' to practice spelling and letter spacing, pointing to and counting leaves, and doing a freehand drawing of their very own leaf!

Right now you can get these worksheets and more as a FREE  sample pack of the full 50-page product that will be posted in my TpT store next week to celebrate the first day of fall!

Thanks for Reading,

Word Blending and Segmenting Activities

Hello Everyone!  It's Brittany again, from Precious Steps Preschool.

Spring has finally sprung here in Western Pennsylvania!  Recently while looking through some spring themed clip art, I came across a cute little snail image from My Cute Graphics.  I just knew that I had to use it on something springy, so it inspired me to create these "Snail Talk" flash cards for Pre-K!

This is an easy activity to throw together with graphics of your choosing.  If you're not familiar with this blending activity, it's very simple.  In "Snail Talk", you sound out a word very slowly, letter by letter.  Place the flash cards in front of your children before choosing a word to sound out.  Let's use 'sun':  /ssssuuuun/.  The children will listen to the sounds that you are saying and in their heads will blend them together to figure out what word you are saying.  When they have their answer, they can grab that card from the pile and hold it up.  To keep children engaged, alternate between having the children raise their hands to answer and then calling on them one by one with having the whole group shout the answer whenever they know it.

This is a great activity to help children develop and strengthen their phonological awareness.  Doing so is a critical part of developing a reader.  Many research studies indicate that students who have a weak phonological awareness also have weak reading skills.

Another fun blending activity that will get your students excited is very similar to Snail Talk, called Robot Talk.

I'm sure you get the idea already.  In this activity, children hear segmented sounds and then blend the into words.  You can do this activity without flash cards by simply choosing items you see from around the room.  Using your best robot voice, ask the students:  Can. You. Tell. Me. What. I. See?  I. See. A. /h/a/t/.

Again, students can shout the answer out loud together, or you can call on them individually and let them each take a turn answering.  In going with my flash card theme for this post, I used the exact same images from the Snail Talk activity and made a set of Robot Talk flash cards as well.  This way you can turn them into a learning center or just break them out anytime you need to fill a few minutes time.

Grab these Snail Talk freebie (and editable) flash cards at my Teachers Pay Teachers Store, here, and the Robot Talk flash cards here.

Thanks for stopping by!