Leaf Sorting: Get into Nature!

{photo credit}

The leaves on our trees are beginning to change colors and fall.  It’s SO beautiful!  But we still have many leaves on the trees, which is an important component to the natural leaf sort we did at the beginning of this week.

Before heading outdoors, I read Why Do Leaves Change Color? by Betsy Maestro aloud to ALuv (currently 6 years old).  Quite a few pages of text are dedicated to showing children that leaves from each tree differ. After discussing that different trees had different kinds of leaves, we went in our wooded backyard. We collected different leaves on the ground and looked up in the trees, trying to figure out from which tree each came-a natural leaf sort!

Our leaf sort lead into some GREAT science questions and discussions such as:

• why did some leaves have stems while others did not
• how did the leaves from that tree made it w-a-y over here
• why were some leaves crunchy and easy to crumble while others weren’t
• why were some leaves tiny and others were very large, even from the same tree
• why did some leaves have holes or bumps
• why are some trees taller than others
• why did some trees still have green leaves while other trees were almost bare

He was a very observant scientist.  One leaf had us totally stumped. But as the wind picked up, we were able to watch a similar leaf blow out of a tree from our front yard into the backyard.  We’d found our answer!

Here are the different kinds of leaves we found…

and the happy scientists who made some wonderful discoveries about leaves!

I shared this idea at Tuesday Tots!

~Becky