Weekly Activities - Leaf Mobile

Book of the week

The Leaf Thief by Alice Hemming and Nicola Slater.

Synopsis

Squirrel is so cross. Yesterday there were loads of beautiful leaves on his tree, but today? Today some are missing and Squirrel is convinced that someone has stolen them... there's a leaf thief on the loose! Join Squirrel on a mission to find the culprit, and meet so many fun animals on the way, while you find out how the world takes on different colours as the months pass by. A brilliant book to learn about the seasons that explores feelings, moods and times where we feel out of control.

Weekly Activities

After reading 'The Leaf Thief' at basecamp we started a discussion about the changing of the seasons and asked the children to describe some of the changes they have seen recently. We talked about what happens to some trees in autumn - deciduous trees lose their leaves whereas evergreens keep them. As there were lots of leaves on the ground, we decided to use them to make leaf mobiles.

We started by asking the children to find a medium sized stick, a match sized stick and a few leaves of various shapes and colours that had fallen to the ground. The children then cut a piece of string or wool, approximately half the length of their arm. We helped them tie one end of the wool to the match-sized stick and the other end to the medium sized stick. They then had to poke a hole in the centre of each leaf i.e. use the match sized stick as a needle to thread the leaves through and gently move it down to the medium stick without breaking or pulling the leaf off (much harder than it sounds!). This created our leaf mobiles. We asked the children to count their leaves and try to write the number on some cardboard for some of the mobiles.

Seeing as we had a lot of buckeye's lying around, we also decided to make necklaces out of them which involved using a hand drill to make a hole through the centre of the buckeye and then use a match sized stick with some wool tied to it to thread through each one to make a very effective looking necklace.

Aims and Objectives