Fall is the time that teachers' and students' thoughts turn to school. Here are some ideas for incorporating fall into your school curriculum.
Select an autumnal color scheme for your bulletin boards using background colors of orange, red, green, brown, and yellow. Try making a checkerboard effect or select yellow paper and allow your students to make silhouettes of leaves with chalk or paint.
Take a walk around the school grounds or nearby neighborhood, collecting leaves, acorns, flowers, etc. that will remind your students of their outing and the things they saw. When you arrive back in the classroom, have them brainstorm a list of sights, sounds, smells, and feelings they experienced. Then have them create acrostic poems for the word "autumn." Once the students have finalized their poems, have them print them on large pieces of red, green, yellow, brown, or orange paper, pasting the items they collected on their walk around the borders. Attach the papers to hangers and suspend them from wire strung in the school hallway.
Something my students are fascinated with is the changing of the seasons and comparing the northern hemisphere with the southern hemisphere. They have Australian keypal friends whose seasons are opposite of theirs. This is a good opportunity to do a little science, explaining and demonstrating the reason for the difference. I like to use a globe and a flashlight, modelling the position of the earth and the sun. This allows the students to visually see why our seasons are in opposition.
For a clever creative/impromptu daily writing activity, I use a small plastic tree, the kind you can stick gumdrops on. I make cut-outs of leaf shapes andcolor them in autumn colors. On each leaf I write a topic or story-starter that relates to autumn and then hang them from the tree with fine yarn. The students select a leaf everyday and write in their journals according to the topic. See The Writing Tree for a more elaborate description of this activity.
Introduce the concept of simile and have your students brainstorm all the things that autumn could be compared to. Engage them in thinking of sensory images that relate to autumn. Then ask them to compose a simile for the beginning sentence "Autumn is like..." Write each simile on a sentence strip and post to a bulletin board using the beginning sentence as a title.
Explore the colors of autumn. Share with your students the perennial favorite Hailstones and Halibut Bones, a book of color poems, focusing on the colors of autumn: red, green, yellow, orange, and brown. Have your students create their own poems of similar nature. Make cut-outs of leaf shapes on which your students can write their finished color poems.
Brainstorm with your class a list of words related to autumn. Use these as a weekly spelling list. I generally make a wordsearch puzzle to give to my class on the first day of the week. On the puzzle I have a series of activities for the students to complete during the week. Among the activities I include are write the words in alphabetical order, write the words and separate them into syllables, write the words and give their parts of speech, write the words and give a synonym for each, select ten of the words and use them in well-constructed sentences, design a symbolic border to represent the words and draw it around the sides of the puzzle paper.
For a simple, yet effective way to have your students practice working with parts of speech, have them write the word AUTUMN down a sheet of notebook paper. Next have them make more columns on the paper, haeding them for specific parts of speech: NOUNS, VERBS, ADJECTIVES, ADVERBS. Challenge them to find a word that begins with one of the particular letters and is the given part of speech.
Return to the Lesson Plans page.
Return to The Teacher's Desk.
Last updated July 21, 1997