Why do leaves turn crispy?

October gave a party;

The leaves by hundreds came - The Chestnuts, Oaks and Maples,

And leaves of every name. 

The sunshine spread a carpet,

And everything was grand,

Miss Weather led the dancing,

Professor Wind the band.                                            

George Cooper

This week we read the story of The Scarecrow. Look at the scarecrows we made to stop the birds from eating our seeds. We even dressed ourselves up as scarecrows!

Aayan had a great idea to use the left over straw to make a straw den. Everyone joined in and helped him. WOW!!!!

PUMPKINS

We have been investigating pumpkins in our key groups.  We discussed what we thought a pumpkin might look like inside and where it might have grown.  When we cut it open we used all of our senses to explore how it felt, tasted, smelt and looked. Some of the children decided to create pictures using the seeds and others chose to plant the seeds in our garden to see if they will grow into plants.

This week we found out that the wind helped the leaves and seeds to fall from the trees. We decided to investigate the wind! We held streamers, blew bubbles and raced balloons.

To investigate further how wind power works we raced balls in the paddling pool. We looked at how the balls moved differently depending on how we blew with our straws. When we blew gently the balls moved slowly and didn't travel very far! When we blew hard the balls moved quickly and travelled right across the paddling pool. We also experimented how to make the balls travel in different directions.

During our Autumn treasure hunts we found a dying Sunflower and part of a birds nest. We took these into our classroom to find out more about them for our floor books.  We used magnifying glasses to closely observe their features and wrote lists of good describing words.

Why not go for an Autumn walk at the weekend and see what other special items you can find !

We planted the seeds we found at Queen's Park in our garden.

We visited Queen's Park to look for signs of Autumn and help us to answer our question 'Why do leaves turn crispy?'.  

We found a variety of leaves of all different sizes, shapes and colours. We collected hundreds of leaves for our outdoor Autumn garden.    

As we strolled deeper into the park we spotted a squirrel collecting nuts ready to hibernate. We collected conkers from the Horse Chestnut tree, acorns from the Oak tree and seeds from the sycamore tree.