[kids focus] leaf walk

For one week, Elle and I focused on leaves. The first day we went on a leaf walk in our backyard and gathered all types of leaves from our trees. After we had gathered a sack of leaves, we took them inside and organized and sorted them by color.

Fortunately (or unfortunately if you are my husband and hate having to rake so many leaves every year - so far we've taken over 22 leaf trash bags to the dump), our backyard is full of leaves. Our "leaf week" fell at the perfect time where there were plenty of leaves on the ground and still in the trees.

If you don't have access to a lot of leaves, you can also make your own. Simply cut leaves (we made leaf die cuts with the Epic Die-Cutting Tool and QuicKutz die REV-0249-S) in several colors and let your child sort those into color piles.

With both options, she had a great time and loved practicing her colors on both the real and paper leaves. On another day, we used the paper leaves to make up "falling leaf" songs. As we sang the songs, we threw the leaves into the air to let them fall to the ground. Baby Liv found this quite entertaining.