Reader who “Made it Her Own” with Felt Leaves!

We were most delighted that Olga (a former University educator who now works with children) took a bit of inspiration from our Fall Fun posts of tracing leaves onto felt and created several activities for teaching English.  From my experience as an educator it was lovely to see ideas that were engaging, hands-on and had visual aids to make the link between the vocabulary and the objects and ideas!   Here is her original post and a big thank you to Olga for allowing us to share her images with our readers!

http://olga-ekb.ru/story/2014/10/12/osennie-listya-iz-fetra

Here are her ideas:

• Use the leaves as props to identify colours particularly those that are typically seen in the Fall.

• Play a memory game where the children look at the leaves and then one child removes a leaf for the other children (while they are not looking) to try to guess which one it was.  Add more items depending on the children’s age.

• Provide children with various sizes of sticks to create a tree, identifying what would be like the trunk, branch, twig, looking at the difference between leaf and leaves (singular and plural spelling changes).

• Or using your hand to make the tree:

• In the comments section, Olga further suggested using the felt leaves for learning the various types of tress they came from or to make a felt tree for the leaves and show how they change with each season.

Included in the post were theses links:

• The previous year the children made trees out of found branches (another idea we love) and painted their own leaves, along with making leaves from torn paper: http://olga-ekb.ru/story/2013/10/20/osen-v-klube

• They also used leaves for rubbings, making prints and as an inspiration for painting: http://olga-ekb.ru/story/2013/10/02/osennee-tvorchestvo-v-raznykh-tekhnikakh

Thank you again Olga!  You truly seem like you enjoy working with children and I can imagine from your ideas, they enjoy learning with you!