Provide Pre-K students with silk leaves, white paper and crayons. Instruct them to study the veins on the leaves, feeling the raised bumps. Have students place the leaves under the paper and rub over the paper with a dark crayon. Afterward, give them diluted tempera paint and demonstrate how to make a crayon resist. A crayon rubbing or drawing shows through diluted tempera wash painted over it.
Read "Leaf Man" by Lois Ehlert to the class. The illustrations show different configurations of leaves designed to look like people and animals. After reading, provide students with different sizes and colors of leaf cutouts, crayons, glue and a large sheet of paper. Demonstrate how to arrange the leaves to make creatures, glue them on the large paper and add facial detail with crayons. Have the Pre-K students create several leaf creatures on the large paper.
Prepare for the activity by printing different types of leaf outlines, suitable for coloring on white paper. Cut the leaves apart, leaving the paper in small rectangles. After looking at and naming some photos of different types of leaves with the students, provide students with the leaf outlines of different types to color. After coloring the leaves, pair students up with their leaves to play a matching game. Instruct students to turn their leaves upside down and then take turns, turning two leaves over at a time and looking for matches.
Discuss and look at photographs of deciduous trees with students. Point out how the leaves change throughout the seasons from buds, to green leaves, to fall colored leaves to brown leaves on the ground making the trees look different. Have students describe the differences. Give the students a large piece of paper, folded over twice to make four boxes. Have students draw one tree with leaves in each box from each of the four seasons.