For the month of October I’ll be doing a unit on fall with pre-k. It started this week, and the first thing we did was learn the “Fall Song,” from Simply Super Storytimes by Marie Castellano. Just the first verse, we couldn’t handle much more than that. We’ll sing the song at the start of every library class until winter starts.

After we “learned” the song (mostly I sang and the kids mumbled the tune), I read the extremely charming Leaves by David Ezra Stein. We talked about changing seasons, what colors we see in the fall, and ways we can tell that winter has arrived (snow, cold).

After all that, the kids went to their tables and I gave them blank pieces of construction paper. I walked around and glued 2 small die cut leaves (thank you, Cuttlebug) onto each paper and let the kids draw whatever they imagine fall looks like. Of course very few of the pictures look like anything more than scribbles, but they used fall colors and were able to tell me what fall thing they had drawn. It worked really well.

This was a great start to the month. Beefing up my pre-k lessons is part of my personal professional development plan for this school year. I’ve worked with this age group at public libraries, but we had more time (story hour isn’t called that for nothing), and their moms are there to help keep things moving along. I’ve got 30 minutes with each class, so I’m trying out lots of different ideas to keep them moving and focused on one thing at a time for small periods of time. It’s going well, I really liked doing this lesson this week.