Fall is here and what better way to learn about it than a fun Autumn Leaves EFL ESL lesson plan for your class! This is a lesson plan for pre-school and younger primary school aged children and will last about one hour. We will learn all about autumn leaves and their colors and then make some Autumn leaf animals together. Along the way we will of course sing lots of songs and play lots of fun Fall themed games. I’ll give you some ideas for songs here but you could also use my favorite Autumn song collection. So let’s get ready to go leaf collecting and learn all about Autumn leaves.
For this Autumn Leaves EFL ESL lesson plan, you will need:
- Leaves of different colors and shapes – ideally real leaves but if you don’t have any then use flashcards, something like this would be great
- Paper and coloring markers
- Scissors and glue
Autumn leaves songs and videos:
- Fall and Autumn Counting Song for Kids by ELF Learning
- Orange, Yellow, Red and Brown by The Learning Station
Introduction
Start your lesson with your normal Hello routine or use one of my favorite Hello songs. Then introduce your subject for the day. You could do this in one of several ways:
- A mystery bag with your leaves in or with the leaf flashcards
- A drawing on the board of a tree with leaves falling
- Watch the video for the Fall counting song
With all of these options, ask the kids what they can see. Talk about the trees, the leaves falling and the colors and count the leaves. Don’t forget to use lots of TPR when you are introducing the vocabulary and get them to repeat the new words a few times. Then play a What’s Missing game with your flashcards or leaves to see if they can remember the colors.
Play a Autumn leaves color matching game
This game is a great way to get children moving around the classroom and avoid sitting still for too long periods of time. If you are teaching online, you could get the kids to look for the colors and objects in their house. To play, take one leaf at a time and ask the children what color it is. Get them to make a complete sentence, “it’s orange”. Now ask them to find something else orange and point it out or bring it to you saying the same sentence. Do this with all the colors of your leaves. If you want, you could make it slightly more difficult and ask them to find a certain number of objects so they have to count too.
Sing an Autumn Leaves counting song
Sing the ELF Learning song together and count the falling leaves. Then draw a big tree on the board or on a big piece of paper and draw leaves of different colors on it. Count the leaves together: “How many orange leaves are there?”, “here are 5 orange leaves” etc. Let the kids ask the question to each other too.
Play another game
Put the kids in pairs and give them each a piece of paper and some coloring markers. Let them tell each other how many leaves to draw and what color they should be. E.g. Three brown leaves or six yellow leaves. When they’ve done this with their partner, they can change partners and try with someone else. If you’re doing this online, this will still work.
Do some Autumn leaves craft
Give the children each a couple of sheets of paper and coloring markers. Then get your real leaves or flashcards out. Show them a leaf and tell them to draw it. Specify whether it should be big or little and what color it should be. If you want them to draw several identical leaves, specify how many. Get them to draw a mixture of different colored and sized leaves and color them in. If you do it too, they will be able to see and do this in an online lesson too. When they’ve finished coloring, give out scissors and let them cut their leaves out.
When the children have cut out their leaves, you can decide what you want them to do with them. With my class, we made animal collages out of the leaves and glued them onto another sheet of paper. This worked very well and looked something like the pictures in this Autumn leaf project. Ask them what animal they have made and what color leaves it is made of.
If you have very young kids in your class, you might prefer to do something simpler. You could draw a tree and get the kids to glue their leaves on the tree and then tell you the colors and how many leaves there are. Whatever you choose to do, the colors will look great and the kids will love it.
Conclusion
When you’ve finished, tidy up the classroom. Then you can finish the lesson with a song and dance and sing the Orange Yellow Red and Brown song. Sing it fast and slow and loudly and quietly and point to to your different colored leaves as you sing. Then end with your usual Goodbye routine or alternatively, use one of my favorite Goodbye songs.
If you have enjoyed this Autumn leaves EFL ESL lesson plan for children, you can find lots more ideas for lesson plans for different aged classes here as well as songs and other teaching ideas. To stay up to date with new articles and lessons, you can follow the GoogooEnglish Facebook page. Alternatively sign up for email updates by filling in the form below.