This week at preschool/toddler story time, we read “The Little Yellow Leaf” by Carin Berger because our color of the week is yellow! It’s a great tale about a leaf that’s just not ready to let go of the tree until she makes a friend. The kids really liked this book.
Our craft today was painting a yellow leaf. This was our messiest craft so far this school year. I took contact paper and cut it out into the shape of leaves. Then the kids painted the paper and the moms and I pulled off the contact leaves to leave a white space where the leaf had been. Here’s our mixed results: 
This is before we pulled the contact paper leaves off. Some kids just wanted to paint the leaf and some wanted to paint all over.
Here is when the contact paper leaf was pulled off. It’s not too bad.
This is the sample one I did, using a permanent paint.
*Poetry Foundation*
For our author spotlight, we read books by Shel Silverstein because his birthday was on Tuesday. I love his books and poems. I read about four poems that the kids really seemed to enjoy. I think some of the humor and irony was too mature for the kids though so I probably won’t do Silverstein with this age group again.
I also read “The Giving Tree” by Shel Siverstein to the kids because it’s one of my favorite books! However, I had to paraphrase it because it’s too long and the pictures aren’t as engaging for this age group. I had worried that might be the case but I wanted to try it out just to make sure. I had one little girl that was really listening well but the other kids got really restless.
Here’s our moms and daycare providers helping the kids with their paintings:
We also did the song, “What Color Are You Wearing?” and each kid got a chance to stand up. I found it on this great website called Teaching Mama. Here’s her link:
https://teachingmama.org/10-preschool-songs-colors/
We had some kids that popped up every time, regardless of what color they were wearing. We had kids that didn’t want to pop up at all. We had kids that listened really well and only popped up when it was their color. I was happy with all of it! I thought it was reinforcing some color names, working on listening skills and helping them learn one another’s names. All great skills to work on so I was thrilled.
