F -- Fall | CtK Preschool

LETTER F -- Fall

This week we welcome the letter F, and our theme is one the children experience with all their senses: Fall. As the seasons change, children notice everything—crunchy leaves, cooler air, shifting colors, and new routines. Fall gives us a wonderful opportunity to explore nature, practice observation skills, and connect learning to what children already see happening all around them.

The letter F fits beautifully here, inviting us to notice all the fall words that begin with F: fall, family, forest, frost, farm,and of course… fun.

Letter Sounds and Our Zoo-Phonics Friend

Our Zoo-Phonics character this week is Francie Fish. As we glide our hand like a fish moving through the water, we make the gentle /f/ sound: “f-f-f.” It’s a quiet sound—one children feel more in their mouths than hear in their ears—so pairing it with movement helps them internalize it in a playful, accessible way.

At school we listen for the F sound in words like fall, leaf, feather, firetruck, and friend. If your child likes singing along to reinforce the sound, you might enjoy this simple phonics song at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBFE4YbA9SU

How We Form the Letter F

Learning Without Tears introduces uppercase F as “a big line down” with “two little lines across,” one at the top and one in the middle. Lowercase f begins with a tall curve (“a candy cane curve”) that comes down through the middle line, followed by a small line across.

Because F has both straight and curved components, children often enjoy practicing it in multisensory ways—drawing it large on an easel, tracing it in a salt tray, or forming it with bendable wax sticks or playdough. These hands-on experiences build the fine-motor strength that will support early writing.

Theme Connection: Fall

Fall is full of natural invitations for learning. In the classroom, we may bring in leaves for careful observation, noticing their textures, colors, and shapes. Children might create simple leaf rubbings, paint trees in warm fall colors, or act out how leaves drift and swirl in the wind.

Stories like Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert or Goodbye Summer, Hello Autumn by Kenard Pak help children think about change in gentle, accessible ways. We sometimes take “fall walks” around the school grounds to see what the season is offering—a pinecone here, a changing tree there—and use these discoveries in our conversations.

At home, children often enjoy gathering a small collection of leaves or acorns, creating simple leaf collages, or helping rake the yard. If you’re looking for fall-themed activities, Hands On As We Grow has a lovely collection of play-based ideas: https://handsonaswegrow.com/fall-activities-for-kids/

Kindergarten Readiness Skill: Observation & Inquiry (WaKIDS/GOLD Objective 24)

This week we are highlighting the readiness skill of observation, which helps children learn how to look closely, ask questions, and make sense of what they see. Fall gives us a natural setting for this—trees changing colors, birds migrating, and weather shifting.

As children notice differences between leaves, describe textures, or talk about changes outside, they are practicing essential science and language skills. At home, you might pause during a walk to wonder together: Why do you think this leaf is red? What do you notice about the air today? What changed since last week?

For families who enjoy nature-based learning, the website Nature Detectives offers child-friendly outdoor exploration ideas:
https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/naturedetectives/activities/

Continuing the Learning at Home

You can bring the letter F into everyday routines simply by naming the F sounds you hear together—food, family, fridge, feather, or footsteps. Children might enjoy helping prepare a fall snack, reading a seasonal picture book, or building a small “leaf pile” indoors with cut paper leaves.

Even something as simple as stepping outside to feel the cool breeze and saying, “Listen… I hear fall,” helps children slow down and connect their learning with the world around them.

Thank you for sharing these moments with your child and for partnering with us in nurturing curiosity and wonder. Fall reminds us that learning is always changing, always unfolding, always full of possibility.

As your child gets older, you can introduce time-telling items for them to play with, like watches, and begin using the "language of time," but don't worry about your child being able to read a clock yet. It's important for them to know that we measure time with clocks and other devices, but time is still quite abstract at this point. By the age of five or six, children are better able to link time to events. Phrases like "today" and "tomorrow" are better understood. Eventually, you can add specific times to the various events of your daily schedule (ie: lunch is at 12:00). You may even chose to put pictures of clocks with the proper time next to the pictures on your visual schedule. A few other recommendations for helping your child understand time (from Ellen Booth Church, courtesy of Scholastic Inc.) include:

Whenever applicable, use the "language of time" to define activities you are doing. Emphasize words such as soon, later, early, yesterday, today, tomorrow, next week, morning, noon and evening. Point out a concrete experience to illustrate the word when you use it.
Create a weather calendar for marking the passage of days. Keep a weather graph of the number of sunny, cloudy, rainy, or snowy days each month. Children can observe the passage of seasons by observing the difference between the September weather graph and the February one.
Show children how to make a "time diary" or journal. Children can use plain paper plates to make the pages and decorate them like clock faces. Show the children how to draw the time on the clock and then ask them to draw, paste, or write about what they usually do at that time. Put the paper plate pages together with brass fasteners to make a book.

When reading books, you can also use this "language of time" as well, by discussing what happened before, after, and predicting what may happen in the future. I included below, a read-along of the book "When the Leaf Blew In," by Steve Metzger, which is not only timely given today's blustery weather but it lends itself well to this sort of discussion.