Fall Leaf Ballet: Hands on Activity for Students

Seeing leaves falling from trees in all their colorful arrays brings forth a sort of excitement and jubilation that young students are eager to share and experience.

This leaf activity not only lets students enjoy the fun of a crisp fall day, while observing the changes in trees, but also allows students to display their physical and artistic creativity in a new and different way. And with physical activities becoming more and more important in our world, this is an excellent way to impress upon children the importance of being physically fit and expressing oneself in a creative way.

Materials needed:

actual fall leaves of all sorts

leaf patterns

construction paper

poster board the size of copy paper

crepe paper streamers in fall colors

colors or markers

stapler or tape

string to use as handhold

Instructions:

Using patterns of leaves, cut them into shapes of all sizes. Color leaves if desired to match leaves displayed in classroom.

attach leaves to tube of poster board paper covering the entire tube shape.

Staple or tape string to top of paper tube.

add streamers to bottom of tube in various lengths and add smaller leaf shapes to bottoms of streamers if you desire.

After attaching leaves, streamers and string to tube, take students outside into the crisp fall day. Gathering students under a tree, discuss how the leaves are falling from the tree onto the ground and how the leaves all fall randomly, without any sort of pattern or design.

After students share their impressions of leaves falling, encourage them to create their own falling leaves by taking their leaf tubes and walking, dancing and slow running around the area. Remind them that leaves do not usually whirl quickly so they should try to match the speed of the actual falling leaves to their leaf tubes. This will result in a delightful leaf ballet of sorts, one which children will want to repeat time and time again.

If desired, for more permanent leaf tubes, you can laminate the leaves or tube you use. This results in a tube that can be used for many leaf ballets both at school and at home.

If needed, this project can be adapted to add more leaf shapes with the name of the tree printed on each shape for extra learning opportunities.