“Love the trees until their leaves fall off, then encourage them to try again next year.” -Chad Sugg

Fall is my favorite season, but living on the coast of South Carolina, we see very little evidence of the season.  We experience fall for about a week and a half in late November or early December.  The leaves are green, turn brown, then fall to the ground in that length of time.  So, I was excited to find a few  leaves on the school grounds that were living it up early! Party on…fall!

Talking about fall with my students is almost as difficult as talking about snow.  I say almost, because we do experience a bit of fall, but we haven’t had significant snow fall here in 10 years.  It’s hard to even talk about the change in weather that fall brings when the high temperature today is 80 degrees. I know, I know…my friends in the north have no sympathy as they’ve already had their first snow fall.  But people, the struggle is real.  So today, in our short sleeves, we left our air conditioned class room to go look for fall leaves.  We discussed why there are so few leaves and the characteristics of the leaves we were able to find.  We made a chart of describing words and then, we grabbed our iPads.

They had a variety of leaves on their tables and they chose 2 or 3.  They opened Pic Collage and used the camera function in Pic Collage to photograph the leaves they chose.  After they added their pictures, they use the text function in Pic Collage to write about the leaves.  Here are a a couple of samples:

Soon, my students will have the choice of which app to use to demonstrate their work.  We use Book Creator for math journals, but it is a great app for science journals, reading response journals etc…For this particular activity, we used Pic Collage, but we can add this Pic Collage image to our science journals in Book Creator. There are so many wonderful creation apps that allow students to create their own content and demonstrate their learning.  The hands-on portion of this activity created a great deal of rich conversation and enabled us to make the anchor chart.

A big part of early childhood education is experiential learning.  Giving children a variety of experiences and enhancing those experiences with the iPads creates long-lasting connections with learning.  The technology extends the learning experience and enriches it.  We spend a lot of time as educators preparing the path for the child, when we need to be preparing the child for the path.

Today we will do exciting new things.  Let’s get to it!