Fall Leaf Hunt + FREE Printable Book (Fall Leaves Week)

Fall Leaf Week is starting! We ended Apple Week, and hopefully you enjoyed all the learning activities and crafts. Cam has asked to study fall leaves, because they’re starting to change colors a little bit. First up in our study is this Fall Leaf Hunt (with a book to read!).

Here’s what we did:
Read a Book & Make a Book

We read the book We’re Going on a Leaf Hunt by Steve Metzger. If you know the classic We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (have you done our fun bear hunt activity??), this is a spin on that book.
As we read, we practiced noticing the letter Ll and the sound it makes on different pages (leaf, tall, etc), because I’m working on writing and recognizing letter L for leaf this week.
After we read the book, I gave Camden his own ‘We’re Going on a Leaf Hunt‘ book. You can click here to open and print the book.

This book practices counting to 5 and recognizing color words. We read the book together and Camden wrote the number in each space, before coloring the leaves.
(After we finish reading each of these books, they go into his personal book bin, so every day he can choose one to read to me or his dad or baby brother.)
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We’re Going on a Leaf Hunt
Now that I had introduced the concept and idea of a leaf hunt, it was time to go on a real leaf hunt!
I printed a set of labels off – there are 5 colors: brown, red, yellow, green and orange. You can click here to open and print the free labels.

Then I cut the labels apart and glued them each to the front of a paper bag. These were our 5 leaf collection bags, and we were ready to go!

We walked to our favorite nature trail, and we picked up leaves from the neighborhoods we walked through too.

Once we had at least a few leaves of each color, we headed back home to count and explore them.
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Counting, Sorting and Graphing Leaves
We opened each bag and Camden dumped out the leaves, one color at a time. He counted them, and then he wrote the number on the bag so we didn’t forget.
Then we looked at each pile of colored leaves to see what we noticed. They were all the same color, but were they:
- the same shape?
- the same size?
- the same weight?
- from the same tree?
After that, I got out a big piece of paper. You could use large poster-size paper, chart paper, a whiteboard, or you could even just use painter’s tape on the floor.

I drew a graph and Camden helped me spell each color word as I made it a place. Then we laid out the leaves in their corresponding color row. We did not glue them, because I want to use these leaves for an activity tomorrow.

This was Camden’s first exposure to a graph, so I taught him how to notice which color has the most leaves, which color had the fewest leaves, and whether there were any ties.
Then we put all the leaves into one paper bag to use for another activity!
Make sure you check out all our other Fall Leaf Week activities and lessons!
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Fall Leaf Week:
- We’re Going on a Leaf Hunt (this post)
- Fall Leaf Paintings
- 15+ Fall Leaf Books
- Invitation to Create: Fall Leaf People
Erin
Really good sweetie.