Happy Fall, Y'all!!

Well, it's officially fall, and we've been celebrating in my speech room this week!

(Even though it's 90 degrees as I type this!)

We've been going lots of talking about fall (a.k.a. autumn) and what happens in the fall. We/ve described fall/autumn using EETchy (I'm just starting the EET!).  We played some Sneaky, Snacky Squirrel Game.  We also read my favorite fall themed book, The Biggest Leaf Pile by Steve Metzger.  Anyone else love that book?  It's a great book not only for learning about fall but for talking about getting along with others, etc. 

AND we did a fun art activity I want to share with you!!

Lemme just say, I LOVE fingerprint art!  As a mom, I always loved when my boys brought home an art project with their hand prints, footprints or even itty bitty fingerprints. (sigh....the good ole days)

Interestingly enough, most kids in our area don't really know what fall trees look like in "real life."  Our trees are GREEN most of the year, and then, the leaves just turn brown (die) and fall off the trees.  Basically, our fall trees are just BARE, but we did look at pictures on the internet of beautiful fall trees. Sadly, a trip to New England to experience the changing of the leaves wasn't in the cards (or the budget) for us. 

Google did the trick, though. 

THEN we made a fall tree of our own!  We started with this bare tree.....

The one shown above has a little poem, "On this fall tree you can see, I've left little parts of me!"  but I actually had three choices of trees for the students to choose from....

We used stamp pads in green, brown, red, purple, orange and yellow, and we used their fingerprints to make the leaves.  If you don't have stamp pads or don't care to use them, leaf stickers or leaf stamps work great, too.   

For some of my students we read the book, The Biggest Leaf Pile, and as we "met" each color leaf in the book and added leaves to our tree.  At the end, we added leaves that were falling to the ground. 

With other students, I just did articulation drill and allowed the students to add 3 leaves to the tree after each round of drill.  The possibilities really are endless. 

In the end, they turned out to be beautiful, and while many of them insisted they take their masterpiece home to show off, a few let me display them proudly on my wall. 

One of my little girls even insisted I take her picture with her tree and "text it to her Mom." WHAT? 

Well, I obliged. I'm a sucker. 

I thought you might want to have a little fall fun in your speech room too, so you can download all three versions of the bare little fall tree HERE.  
Hope yours turn out just as cute!  

I'd love to hear your feedback if you download. 

Even better... 
I'd love for you to post photos of your little masterpieces on my facebook page! 

Happy Fall, Y'all!