Singing Autumn Leaves

I was recently called back into primary as the pianist, and I think it is my dream calling. I absolutely love playing the piano for primary. I work with some wonderful music leaders. They do a great job. Much better, I think, than when my husband and I were music leaders! During the summer, they had a big cardboard sun on the board, and after each song, a child that had been trying really hard during that song was chosen to come and choose one of the "rays" from around the sun. Each ray had a song number written on it, and that was the song we sung.


At the beginning of autumn, our music leaders came with a basket full of real, dry autumn leaves. On each leaf was the song number. The kids have so much fun gently shaking the basket and then carefully picking out a leaf and reading the song number. Sometimes they have to guess the song. And sometimes the leaves get crushed :) But it's all part of the fun, and the leaves get replaced.I love this idea so much that I decided to incorporate it into our family home evenings. I figure that this way, if I use the same song numbers, it will give my children a few extra chances to practice the songs at home. 


I didn't use real leaves (although I do love the textural element of those dry leaves) because I wanted to be able to keep mine as long as possible, and because it's actually raining here in Perth, for the first time in a long while, so all the autumn leaves are soggy and squished. So I bought some red, orange and brown card and spent a couple of nights tracing leaf shapes onto my coloured card and cutting them out. I couldn't be bothered laminating and cutting out all those laminated leaves though. 

To make them re-useable, I put a piece of tape on the back of each leaf. Then I cut some plain white self-adhesive labels into small pieces and put a piece on top of the tape, then wrote the song numbers on the label. When I want to change the song numbers, I'll be able to just peel the label off the tape, and put another label on. 

 I'm thinking about making a cardboard branch for the leaves to be displayed on, or maybe once the rain stops and everything dries out again I'll get a real branch, put it in a vase and blu-tack the leaves to that. The kids think it's a great idea. They love picking out a song from the basket, and it helps them to learn the songs they're working on in primary too, because I use those songs on the leaves.

For winter, I think I'll make a cloud with raindrops and write the song numbers on each raindrop. I thought about doing snowflakes, but we don't get snow. We don't really get much rain either but at least the kids know what rain is :)