Fall Colors and Talking Leaves with Preschool

 The school I teach at starts in junior kindergarten, or preschool. Students are four years old when they start the school year. This presents many challenges for designing projects. Students are so young when they start. The beginning of the school year is focused on students adjusting to the structure of school, transitioning to different spaces and learning about the library space. For the first several weeks of school, the library is a more traditional storytime and time for the students to find books to check out. Once the junior kindergarteners are more settled into the school year, I introduce projects connected to what we are reading and learning that take several class sessions to complete. This year, I started with a project connected to fall colors, seasons changing and talking leaves!

The project started with reading several books that talk about the changing seasons. We read: Leaves by David Ezra Stein, Hocus Pocus It’s Fall by Anne Sibley O’Brien and Old Bear by Kevin Henkes. With each book students shared what connections they made with the story including noticing the leaves changing colors around the city, activities they do with their families during fall like apple picking and pumpkin carving and what they know about how animals start to prepare for the winter. Junior kindergarteners also made connections with the colors and pictures in the books. The illustrations in the book all had the colors red, yellow and orange, all colors that they see around the city and the neighborhood during the fall.

After reading the books and making connections with the topics and what they see in the world around them we moved to the project. In my library program, we focus on weaving technology in and finding ways for students to see technology as a tool to share their voices and knowledge. When students are so young, technology is introduced sparingly and with intention taking their developmental age into consideration. For this project, the app Chatterpix was shared. This app is a simple and fun app that allows users to add a mouth to a picture and then record their voices.

Each student picked the picture of the fall leaf they liked the most, red, yellow or orange. Then they drew a mouth on the leaf and recorded their voice saying “My favorite fall color is _____.” The junior kindergarteners giggled and laughed so much hearing their voices come out of the leaves! After each student recorded their talking leaf, the videos were uploaded and a QR code was generated. The final step was printing out the QR codes and attaching them to a leaf. Then I created a “JR Talking Leaf Tree”! I attached the leaves to a fake light up tree and displayed it in the school hallway so that students, teachers, families and other community members could scan the QR codes and hear all the leaves talk!

This was a great first project from my youngest students. The junior kindergarteners were able to engage in a project and make connections with the information they learned and shared over several weeks. Students were also able to use their own voices with a new piece of technology to start to make connections with the idea of technology as a way to share their ideas and knowledge. The final project share out was a public display that highlighted the youngest students in the school’s work.