What You Need

A collection of fresh picked leaves

A cookie sheet

A printout with a simple leaf template duplicated 5 times.

Crayons in a selection of fall colors

How Do Leaves Grow?

Plants need to eat food to grow just like people do. Plants make a special kind of sugar for food using sunlight and a chemical inside them called chlorophyll that turns them green. We know when plants are getting enough food to eat because they are bright green and look healthy. During the spring and summer when there is lots of sunlight, plants make a lot of food and are a bright green color.

In the fall, there is not as much sunlight and plants can not make as much food. The trees start to get ready to go to sleep for the winter just like bears go into hibernation. During the spring and summer they have made enough food for them to survive through the winter. Because they aren't making as much food, the leaves on the trees don't make the bright green color so they start to show all of the other colors that they have inside like, red, oranges, yellow, and brown.

What To Do

Have preschoolers go outside and pick a variety of fresh leaves from the trees. Explain that you are going to find out what happens to leaves when they can not make enough food. Tell preschoolers that leaves get their food through the tree branches and when you pick them they don't have any way to get food.

Spread the picked leaves out on a cookie sheet and set them in your science center. Make a handout for each preschooler that has a simple leave template duplicated 5 times. Have preschoolers look at the leaves and find a crayon that matches the color that the leaves are when they are first picked. Have preschoolers color the first leaf template to match the leaves.

Leave the leaves out for an entire week and each day have preschoolers visit the science center and look for any changes in the leaves. Have preschoolers color one leaf on their handout each day to match the color of the leaves.

At the end of the week, have preschoolers look at the leaves. The leaves may be wrinkled and dry. The leaves may have changed colors and look brown instead of green. Ask the preschoolers why they think the leaves look different than they did when they were on the tree. Tell the preschoolers that the leaves could not make any food so they started to change colors. The leaves weren't getting any water so they started to dry up.

Related Preschool Literature

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Helpful Tips for Parents

• Field trips — even to the grocery store, the post office, or the library — are powerful educational experiences. Real-world contexts anchor abstract concepts in memory.

• Involve children in planning: menus, weekend activities, family projects. Decision-making and planning are executive function skills that predict long-term academic success.

• Model learning yourself. A parent who reads books, asks questions, visits museums, and says "I don't know, let's find out" teaches learning as a lifestyle, not a chore.

• Learning is most durable when it's embedded in play. Don't pull children away from play to "do learning" — find the learning inside the play they're already doing.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I support a gifted preschooler who seems to need more than peers?

Gifted preschoolers benefit from depth rather than acceleration — instead of teaching next-year's content, provide deeper engagement with current concepts. A preschooler fascinated by numbers doesn't need grade-school arithmetic; they benefit from mathematical puzzles, spatial reasoning challenges, and mathematical exploration at their own depth. Social-emotional support is equally important: gifted preschoolers often have asynchronous development (advanced intellectually but emotionally typical for their age) and need appropriate peer interaction alongside intellectual challenge.

Related reading: See also our read-aloud guide and our kindergarten readiness guide for more ideas on this topic.

🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop

• 🧠 Memory & Recall — Remembering rules, retelling a story in sequence, and practicing skills to automaticity builds working memory and long-term recall — the cognitive foundation that learning in every subject depends on.
• ⚡ Executive Function — Planning, sequencing steps, holding rules in mind while acting, and stopping a prepotent response all build executive function — the cluster of cognitive skills most strongly predictive of long-term academic and life success.
• 🤔 Critical Thinking — Being asked "why do you think that?" and forming and defending an answer develops the analytical reasoning children need for reading comprehension, mathematics, and evidence-based argumentation.
• ✏️ Pre-Writing Development — Drawing, tracing, and early mark-making develop the fine motor control and visual-motor integration that handwriting requires — making every drawing activity a contribution to writing readiness.

To preschoolers, the changing colors of fall leaves may seem like something close to magic. This simple science lesson will help preschoolers to understand the process that leaves go through in the fall when they begin to change colors and what plants need to live and grow.