Things to do with leaves

Bringing natural play into your literacy lessons

A great way to bring some guided play into your literacy lessons is combining leaves and hole punches. The process of punching shapes from the leaves is a great exercise in fine motor development, pre-writing skills and finger strengthening.

For this activity, we used leaves from a lemon tree - the smell was amazing adding a sensory layer to our play. Some punches were easier to use than others and we eventually settled for just using the smallest star punch.

Sitting and punching shapes from the leaves was very relaxing and it proved a great chance just to “have a chat” which is a regular feature of our days. Once there was a little pile of lemon scented stars in front of us, the question turned to what to do with them. Some options offered were:

• Throw them like confetti

• Put them in a jar for making potions

• Glue them to paper

I latched on to that suggestion and wondered aloud what we could do with them on the paper. After moving past the suggestion to put glue on the paper and “just drop them on” we talked about drawing shapes or letters and excitedly settled on gluing them in the shape of our names. Just as easily this could have turned into a bit of maths play if we had chosen shapes instead, but this is where a bit of gentle guidance can be useful!

I wrote the names on paper, depending on the development of the children in your room they might do this themselves. We then used glue sticks to trace one letter at a time and stick the stars on to the letters. After a few moments of sticking I heard, “Maybe I should have used a bigger hole puncher!” It did turn into a bit of tedious work for longer names, but I was happy to leave the paper on the table for children to come back to later.

Would you try this in your classroom? Let me know if you do!