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Add Color -- and Learning --
To Your Fall Lesson Plans!
Savor the season! Bring the colors of fall into the classroom with hands-on science and language activities
that will teach important concepts and valuable study skills. Included: Ten activities to
teach about the season!
GREAT ACTIVITIES TO CELEBRATE FALL AND ITS COLORS
Math and graphing -- charting fall temperatures. Choose a local newspaper, a local TV station, or a
national weather Web site, such as the Weather Channel,
to use as a resource for collecting local temperatures during September and October. Students can use Education
World's Fall Temperatures teaching master as they collect
data relating to each day's high temperature, low temperature, and average temperature. Students in grades 4
and above might figure the week's average high, low, and average temperatures.
Add a lesson in graphing to the exercise above: Students can create a bar graph or a line chart to
show the average temperatures throughout the season.
Math -- estimating. Challenge students to estimate the number of leaves on a tree. To start, they might
count the leaves on several "typical" branches, then figure the average number of leaves per branch. For complete
details on this activity, including questions to ask, see How
Many Leaves on a Tree? from the BellNet Technology Network.
Hands-on science -- learning about photosynthesis. Without enough sunlight, plants cannot use the
process of photosynthesis to produce food. To prove that fact, students should select a tree leaf or the leaf
of a houseplant. Cover part of that leaf (up to half of it) with a piece of cardboard or foil. Wait at least a
few days, then remove the cardboard or foil. What happened? What does that prove? (For complete details and follow-up
questions, check the Photosynthesis Activity
from Newton's Apple. The activity includes a student activity page.)
Science -- understanding the seasons. Why are there seasons? What is the weather like during the different
seasons? When you go to bed in the summer, is it light or dark outside? When you go to bed in the winter, is it
light or dark outside? Gather a globe, a flashlight, and a few other common materials to set up an activity that
will demonstrate that seasons exist because of the tilt of Earth and its impact on the intensity of the sunlight
at a given location. For the details of this experiment, see the Seasons
Lesson (original source: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign).
Solving word problems. Challenge students to solve math word problems based on the pictures and information
on the Pumpkinfest Winners Web page. Here
are some sample questions:
- How much more did Gary Burke's winning pumpkin (1998) weigh than the pumpkin grown by Harry Willemse (2000)?
(130 pounds)
- How much more did Gary Burke's pumpkin weigh than the one grown by Andrew Papez? (172 pounds)
- How many pounds did five winning pumpkins between 1998 and 2002 weigh altogether? (4,949.5 pounds)
- In 2000, how much heavier was Harry Willemse's pumpkin than the squash grown by Dave McCallum? (19 pounds)
Language and science -- learning more about photosynthesis. Use this as a group activity. Print out a copy
of the story Why Leaves Change
Color (from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Web site) for each group. Students can take
turns reading the story. Then they can work together to complete the true-false exercise on Education World's
Photosynthesis teaching master. (Option: In a one-computer
classroom, students might sign up for a half-hour of computer time to complete this activity.) Answer Key:
1. T, 2. T, 3. T, 4. T, 5. F, 6. F, 7. F, 8. T, 9. T, 10. T.
This activity is best for students in grades 4 through 8. If you are teaching younger students about
photosynthesis, you might create a true-false quiz using Why
Leaves Change Color from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
If you teach high-school science, a more complex explanation of photosynthesis can be found at The
Chemistry of Autumn Colors, which is part of the Chemical of the Week feature on the Science Is Fun Web
site from University of Wisconsin-Madison chemistry professor Bassam Z. Shakhashiri.)
Language arts -- webbing fall. What activities, holidays, clothing, and other changes do your students
associate with fall? Individual students or small groups can create webs to show their ideas.
Click here to see how your
students' webs might begin to look.
Then it's time to brainstorm related words and details -- using lots of good nouns, adjectives, and verbs
-- for each of those ideas. When the webs are complete, students can pool their ideas to create a class chart
of fall words and ideas. They can use those ideas to write a story about their favorite things about fall.
Language arts -- writing poetry. Brainstorm nouns, verbs, and adjectives about fall. (You might already
have a good starter list if you did activity #7 above.) Students can use those words to help them as they write
fall poems. For inspiration, you might share some of the work posted by students to the An
Apple a Day Web site. (For more apple related activities, be sure to see An
Apple for the Teacher. That Education World story from last fall is full of great ideas!)
Handwriting. Choose an October poem as a class handwriting activity. Post the best student handwriting
samples on a bulletin board for all to see.
Language arts -- editing. Use the You Be
the Editor teaching master with this activity. Make copies of the teaching master for students, or post
the activity at a language arts learning center. Challenge students to work on their own or in pairs to edit
the paragraphs. There are ten errors of capitalization, punctuation, spelling, or grammar in the text, which
is borrowed from the Why Do Leaves Change
Color in the Fall? page of a Web site called Science Made Simple. You might check out the Web page; it offers
several cool science experiments for students in the upper elementary grades and above.
Answer Key:
- The headline needs a question mark after the word Fall.
- In paragraph 1, the word they at the start of the second sentence needs a capital T.
- The third sentence needs a period after the word air.
- The word using is spelled wrong in the fourth sentence.
- The wrong form of the verb is used in the last sentence of the first paragraph; the word should be gives,
not gaves.
- In the second paragraph, the word dry is spelled wrong in the first sentence.
- The word then in the fourth sentence should begin with a capital T.
- The wrong form of the verb is used in the last sentence of the paragraph; the sentence should read "Those
colors were," not "Those colors was."
- In the last paragraph, the word red is spelled wrong in the first sentence.
- A period is needed after the word leaves at the end of the paragraph.
Article by Gary Hopkins
Education World® Editor-in-Chief
Copyright © 2007 Education World
Originally published 09/19/2002
Links last updated 08/22/2008
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