Learning Sight Words with Fall Leaves

When the leaves start changing colors around here, one of our favorite things to do is go outside for leaf hunts! We take buckets and collect any leaves that catch our eye. We always end up coming back with full buckets! This year we wanted to put our leaves to good use so we used them for a few different learning activities. I’m excited to share with you one of the ways we used our fall leaves for learning and playing!

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Kade is in pre-k this year and we are doing school at home. As an introduction to sight words, we have been working on learning to read, recognize/identify, and spell color words. This has been helpful in terms of incorporating Tatum, who’s 2, as she is working on lots of color matching, color sorting, and naming all colors. I tried to coordinate the colors of the leaves we collected with the color words that we were working on, but you could totally do this same activity with just regular sight words, or even names!

To prep, I picked out some of the best looking leaves out of our leaf hunt buckets and used colored painters’ tape and a black sharpie to label each leaf with a letter. I tried sticking with yellow leaves to spell out the word “yellow,” green leaves for the word “green,” and red leaves for the word “red.” We didn’t have enough orange or brown, so we kept things simple with just the three words.

I had Kade (who’s 4.5) use some sight word flash cards as a guide to spell out each word using the leaves. Once he spelled each word out in leaves, I had him also spell out the word using magnetic letters to reinforce the spelling again. This was also a great way to practice letter identification, and to think about the sounds we hear in each word.

Has anyone noticed the colored buttons on the leaves in this book in some of the photos? This is how we included Tatum (2) using our fall activity book. She was working on color matching! She had a little baggie of buttons and was finding a colored button to match each leaf. She always loves to be involved in the activities that Kade does so sometimes we have to improvise, think on the spot, and get creative!

Speaking of our activity book, we then used this page and worked together to place a finger on each green dot below the words as we read the simple sentences. Before reading, I pointed out a few of the sight words and we talked about how the only word that would be different in each sentence was the color word. Kade is not officially reading at this point, but little activities like this are a great way to introduce early literacy concepts such as tracking print, left to right progression, using pictures as context clues, and identifying sight words in texts.

By the time we got to the final sentence, he had caught on and was asking if he could try it by himself. These repetitive sentences are a great way to build confidence in young readers. As confidence builds, they are more likely to take risks and try new things when it comes to reading, writing, and other academic skills.

If you liked this activity, be sure to pin an image from the post so you can save it and try it out in your own home!

I mentioned our activity book(s) and wanted to share a few other ways we used pages from them during our fall leaf theme!

Counting Colored Leaves:
This is a page from our fall-themed activity book. Kade counted leaves of each color, and then used number stickers to record how many there were of each. Since the pages in our books are re-usable, the stickers peel right off so that the pages can be used over and over again. You could also choose to use magnetic numbers, dot stickers with numbers written on them, or you can write on these pages with dry erase marker and they wipe clean. :)

Counting with Ten Frames:
This is a page from our numbers & shapes activity book. We used stickers here again but this time were filling in each ten frame with fall leaf stickers (ours were from the Target dollar section, but I found these which would work great, too). Ten frames are a great visual learning tool that kiddos will be introduced to in kindergarten. They help to visualize number amounts 1-10 and also are a great way to practice adding two numbers together to get to 10 (5 and 5, 4 and 5, 9 and 1, etc).

“Ll” Letter Build:
This is a page from our fall-themed activity book. The idea is to work on the formation of an uppercase and lowercase “L” representing the first sound in the word “leaf.” You could build the letters using play doh, real leaves, leaf vase filler or table confetti, or in this case- mini erasers. We went a different route and chose to use lady bugs because we had been seeing lady bugs around our house a lot lately so it was a fun connection for the kiddos to make. Tatum helped by building the lowercase “l” while Kade built the uppercase “L.” It was a group effort. ;)

“Leaf” Word Build:
This is also a page from our fall-themed activity book and is similar to the letter build. You can build the word with a variety of materials including play doh, magnetic letters, letter stickers, or like we did here- with dot stickers. I wrote the letters on the stickers in advance, in uppercase and lowercase, and Kade had to peel them off and match them to the letters in the word. This is a great way to work on letter identification while also exposing kiddos to the spelling and reading of a new word.

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