leaf learnin'

I haven't shared much about our homeschooling endeavors lately, but Finn and I have so enjoyed the leaf unit we've been working on this week that I thought I'd show you a bit of what we've been working on. As autumn starts to cool our air and bring the slightest hint of color to our trees, Finn and I have been studying the leaves that will soon be changing and falling all around us.

Almost everything we've done this week has had a hint of autumnal leaf to it, which seems to suit Finn just fine. We've collected several leaves from our yard.


And compared those leaves to our leaf guide.



We've made numerous crayon rubbings over leaves.


Then we compared the rubbings to the leaves and especially looked at the vein structure to see how much showed through on the crayon rubbing.


We baked a "leaf loaf" of sourdough bread, which we enjoyed with peach jam harvested just a few weeks ago.


We colored pictures of trees, identifying the roots, trunk, branches and leaves each with a different color.


We learned the parts of a leaf and colored them.


Finn can read the word tree so we made a worksheet for him to read and practice writing tree. (Finn loves worksheets and flies through them as quickly as I print them, but I try to keep them on topic and relevant to what he is learning so that he continues to enjoy them.)


We did some wet-on-wet watercolor painting of leaf colors and then traced one of our maple leaves on the dried painting.


Finn drew veins on his watercolor leaves.


And we hung the watercolor leaves in the window over the nature table.

This time of year seems to inspire so much learning and creativity. I think we might extend our leaf learnin' for another week and find more fun leaf projects to enjoy.