Leaf Magic
The late days of September, through October and then early November present wonderful opportunities for children at forest school to creatively use the fabulously coloured autumn leaves. Playing with the leaves also draws their attention to the changes as the season progresses.
Young children’s observational skills can be honed by finding leaves of different colours and arranging them in ‘stick treasure chests’ laid out on the ground according to the leaf colour. Rectangles of bright red, yellow, orange and green leap out from the brown forest floor on a grey autumn day. Other ephemeral art projects which keep whole classes enthusiastically busy working together to achieve a big result can include putting leaf feathers on huge stick bird outlines arranged on the earth or the scales on a similarly oversized fish out of water on the floor.
Team work is needed to shuffle a trail in the leaves. A whole class can hold each others waists or shoulders and move conger style through the thick coloured carpet to make a striking ,huge pattern. The children can be encouraged to carefully kick the leaves away to each side with each stride and not let go or the trail will not stand out in the woodland. Spirals work well especially if the whole line turns around once the spiral is made to the middle, let go of the child in front and follow their pattern out to the where is began. Lots of youngsters will tell you they have just made a snail. Continuous crossing trails, such as figures of eight are great fun to race along, following the give way rules set by the children.
Autumn leaves also coincide with Firework celebrations and Remembrance. Flames and fireworks that climb the trees look great and are fun to work together on. Use bright leaves and stick them with scrap clay or clay soil. Commemorative lines and patterns where each leaf represents a number of fallen can help older children appreciate the scale of the loss of lives during world wars. For example a trail or poppy outline five thousand leaves big can represent the fifty million lives lost during WW2 – each leaf representing 10,000 lives.
Stories of leaf Magic, do the leaves change colour or were the other colours just hiding until Mr Chlorophyll had to leave?
Leaf storms, cover a foot with fallen leaves, wiggle a toe to be a creeping spider, of move all your toes to be a mouse scuttling through them. Next the wind begins to gentle blow, move the leaves with your hands to create a soft sound as the wind increases move the leaves more and more until the wind picks up a handful and throws them in the air.
