building our nature alphabet

Building our Nature Alphabet

As we introduce new letters during Fundations, we will bring our work and learning into the woods; building the taught letter, talking about words that begin with the same letter sound, and finding the letter on trail signs and maps!

On Monday we learned the letter b, built the letter b, and thought about other words that start with the b sound; bug, banana, bat, bunny, big, a bat eating a banana...

As children were building the letter b, a strong Fall wind picked up, causing yellow leaves to rain from the trees. This created a lot of excitement and a sense of magic in the woods. 

Art from Nature

With a natural canvas of color outside our classroom door, we read the alphabet book Art from Nature on Monday. We talked about how we can create our own alphabet book using leaves as our art tool. We can be inspired by this alphabet book. We had two jobs connected to letters and the woods on Monday; build the letter b using natural materials and collect 10 leaves for us to use in our own Art from Nature alphabet book. 

These jobs provided an additional counting opportunity! Roxy shared the strategy of counting leaves as she put them in her bag, checking her counting and ensuring she only collected 10 colorful leaves. The children carefully selected the most beautiful leaves for us to sort, count and press. 

Extending and Connecting

The following day we counted how many leaves we collected. With Sam as our recorder, we sorted the leaves by color, counting how many leaves of each color. Children predicted which color leaf we collected the most of. They compared amounts. They noticed that we collected the same amount of yellow and red leaves and that we collected the least number of green leaves. We will continue to collect leaves in the coming weeks, ensuring we have enough leaves to each create an Art from Nature alphabet book.

 

Readers read different kinds of books!

We can learn more about Fall and how the leaves change by reading teaching books or learn-about-the-world books. These books teach us real information. The children engaged with the read aloud Full of Fall. They thought about what changes they would observe on our hike on Tuesday. They responded to the read aloud with the writing prompt; It is Fall. Draw a picture of a change you will see.

They used information from the book; colors and movement. You can see their use of "action marks" to show how leaves fall from the trees. 

Following our informational reading and writing, we took to the trail, eager to find the Beaver pond! Throughout our hike we connected back to Full of Fall, transferring the information we gathered from the book to our noticings and observations in the woods.