With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a textĪctively engage in group reading activities with purpose and understandingīefore reading the title, have children spend a few minutes looking at the cover illustration. Here, we share a few ideas for before reading, during reading, and after reading. As you read, engage children by asking questions and defining difficult vocabulary. The text is poetic and celebrates the natural landscape of the countryside. Children will love searching the illustrations for hidden pictures formed by the leaves as they make their journey. The leaves start out in the shape of a man and take on different configurations as they travel east, west, north, and south, going where the wind blows. Lois Ehlert’s book Leaf Man follows a group of autumn leaves as they are blown by the wind over fields, past orchards, through prairie meadows, and across lakes and rivers. (Sept.Preschool and Kindergarten Leaf Man Activities

After this visual feast, young nature lovers are sure to look with fresh eyes as they walk through the woods. Endpapers serve as a labeled field guide to leaf varieties and an author's note expresses Ehlert's passion for her subject, and describes her art technique. And, in the type of clever book design for which Ehlert is known, the pages are die-cut and/or patchworked at the top to create a rolling, flowing effect throughout. The boldly colored background papers, of varying texture, make the leaves pop. Fiery maple, brown mottled catalpa and bright yellow ginko leaves take the shape of various animals and objects on each spread.

All the while, Ehlert sparks her foliage flight of fancy with her snazzy leaf collages. past the spotted cows,' and punctuates the lyrical text with an occasional refrain ( ' a Leaf Man's got to go where the wind blows

'He left no travel plans.' From that breezy beginning, the narrator imagines the different flight patterns the Leaf Man may have followed 'past the chickens, toward the marsh. A narrator recalls the Leaf Man that used to live nearby but recently blew away with the wind. ) returns to one of her favorite themes-the rainbow beauty of autumn leaves-for this refreshing riff on leaf peeping and collecting.

Leaf man book