Lesson Plans for the Book Mouse's First Fall
Autumn-Themed Activities in Science, Math, Language Arts, and Drama
Aug 30, 2008
A trade picture book makes an excellent jumping-off point for learning and practicing new content-area knowledge and skills. Share Mouse's First Fall by Lauren Thompson [Simon & Schuster, 2006] with preschool and kindergarten children and then use the following lesson plans for fall-themed science, math, language arts, and drama activities.
Introduce and Share the Book
Display the book's cover and discuss the title and picture. Ask students to make predictions about activities Mouse might do with fall leaves. Read the book aloud and check predictions. Make a list with students of the things Mouse and Minka did while playing outside in the autumn leaves.
Life Science Lesson: Sorting by Physical Attributes
Preparation: Cut out leaf shapes from red, yellow, orange, and brown paper in shapes that are round, skinny, pointy, and smooth.
- Reread the text where Minka tells Mouse to look at all the colors, and Mouse sees red, yellow, orange, and brown leaves.
- Have children identify leaves of each of these colors in the book illustrations.
- Explain that when you sort objects, you put ones that are alike in some way together in groups.
- Tell children that when scientists study leaves, sometimes they sort them into groups by color.
- For assessment, pass out the paper leaves to small groups. Ask groups to sort these leaves by color.
Life Science Lesson: Describing Physical Attributes
- Reread the text where Minka tells Mouse to look at all the shapes, and Mouse sees round, skinny, pointy, and smooth leaves.
- Explain that scientists use describing words such as these to tell what the objects they are studying look like. Help children define each adjective and find examples of leaves that possess each characteristic in their piles of paper leaves and in the book illustrations. Discuss how a leaf can be more than one of these characteristics at a time, such as round and smooth or pointy and skinny.
- For assessment, hold up different paper leaves and have children use the words round, skinny, pointy, and smooth to describe them.
Mathematics Lesson: Estimation
- Reread the text where Mouse piles the leaves high.
- Stack several paper leaves in a pile and point out that you can describe the number of leaves in the pile by saying there are "lots of leaves" in the pile. Then ask children to guess how many leaves are actually in the pile. Record guesses and then count the leaves. Discuss how close estimates were and if they were higher or lower than the actual number.
- Explain that using what we see to make a guess about how many objects are in a group is called estimating.
- For assessment, pair children and have one child make a pile of leaves and the other child estimate how many leaves are in the pile and then count the leaves to check his or her estimate. Ask children to take turns doing this activity.
Integrated Language Arts and Drama Lesson: Descriptive Action Verbs
Preparation: Clear an open space in the classroom.
- Reread the text that describes the falling leaves as "tumbling and twirling."
- Have children stand up and act out "tumbling" and "twirling."
- Explain that these words are action words, or verbs, that describe how something moves. The author chooses action words carefully to paint a picture in the reader's mind of how something looks as it moves.
- For assessment, reread the book and have children identify and act out other descriptive action verbs such as run, skipped, kicked, swished, jump, leaped, plopped, rolled, peeked, poked, peered, and popped.
- As an extension activity, identify and discuss the author's use of action verbs that alliterate, or begin with the same sound.
- As another extension activity, discuss synonyms, or words that mean almost the same thing. Write cloze sentences on the board such as "Mouse _______ between the leaves," and discuss whether the words the author slots into each sentence mean exactly the same thing or not.
After doing each lesson, look in the future for opportunities to refer back to the material covered here and to provide students with further practice with these skills. For example, students could collect other fall objects (such as nuts and other kinds of seeds) to describe, sort, and group to make estimates. In addition, you can use the book Fall Is Not Easy for other autumn-themed content-area lessons.
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