“Today, we’re going to discover the magic of fall leaves!” An Educator announced. Children jumped with excitement. They wandered around to look for all the fall coloured leaves, bright reds, sunny yellows, and deep oranges.
“Look at this one!” shouted Abigail, holding up a large, red leaf sharing, “It’s so pretty!”
Megha encouraged the children to collect leaves. Each child worked really hard to find leaves, and they filled the bag with different shapes and sizes of leaves.
Back on the centre playground, we dumped the bag of collected fall leaves in the sensory bin. Children were provided big spoons, bowls, tongs and ladles to explore with. They thoroughly enjoyed this experience by collecting the leaves in their given container. Some children shared as they stirred the leaves in the bin that they were making soup. “Yummy!” Brooke expressed as she pretended to eat the soup. Tongs were also used to pick leaves from the bin. The children worked on their fine motor skills as well as their hand eye coordination and cognitive skills during this activity.
Overall, a fall leaves sensory bin is a fun and educational activity that promotes various areas of development such as: hand eye coordination, the ability to focus on a task, imaginative play, language, cause and effect, among others. Children absolutely enjoyed this experience so we decided to take it indoors, where the children could paint with the leaves, to make shapes with the leaves.
Children were provided sponges along with fall leaves and paint to express their creativity and imagination. Hendrix began to paint over the leaves and it appeared he was trying to make them stick to the paper. When they were done with painting, they looked at their leaf collections and art pieces. They appeared to feel proud and happy, knowing they had learned and created something special with items from the world around them.
We wonder what journey the children will go on as we continue to explore other fall activities.
