The Four Seasons - Spring Summer Fall Winter

This lesson if for a preschool or kindergarten class studying the four seasons (fall, winter, spring, summer) using language arts or as an integrated unit. From this lesson, students will learn about the weather associated with each of the seasons, activities that occur in each of the seasons, and which months fall under each season. You can extend this lesson by doing activities that you have discussed for the season you are currently in. The song will help students reinforce what they have learned about the seasons.

Lesson: The four seasons
Background: This lesson is designed for a Preschool/Kindergarten class studying the four seasons in Language Arts or as part of an integrated unit.

Objectives:
(1)Students will be able to distinguish which characteristics of the weather are associated with each season
(2)Students will be able to determine which season certain activities are limited to.
(3) Students will be able to determine which months fall under each season,

Materials Needed:
bulletin board
colorful cards labeled with the name of each season
pictures of snow, snowmen, heavy coats, ice skates, a flower pot, bathing suits, Thanksgiving turkey,
Halloween, trees with different color leaves, a copy of the song
"What Shall We Do? (Palmer, 1988)
additional pieces of large paper heavy marker.

Procedure:
(1)Begin by finding out what your students already know about the four seasons. (Do they know bow many seasons there are, what the names of the seasons are, about when they fall, what is characteristic of each?) Depending on the depth of responses you receive, restate accurate information, or present it to the class.
(2)Discuss what season each month falls in, how the temperature/weather changes, and what activities tend to take place during the season. If at all possible try to elicit this information from the children rather than giving it all to them (what did you do over the summer, before school started? When it snowed last year?).
(3)Have students move prepared pictures to corresponding area on season bulletin board to demonstrate understanding.
(4)Once this has been covered, ask students to play a game with you. You will think of a season and the children will ask you questions to try to find out what season it is. Once the students seem to understand the game, allow them to think of a season while the rest of the class guesses.
(5)Introduce the song, "What Shall We Do"(Palmer, 1988), to the class, pointing to the words as you sing them. Invite the class to join you as you sing the song 2 more times or until students are familiar with it.
(6)Then ask students to volunteer what they like to do that they really only do during certain seasons (ice skate). Together with the class write at least one new verse for each season. Example: We will skate our figure-eights/ figure eights, figure eights/ we will skate our figure eights/ When we all go out to play.

Assessment:
The first assessment you will do is when you elicit their prior understanding of the seasons and seasonal activates. Clearly the less they know, the more time you will want to spend on this (perhaps creating a bulletin board with the class1 suggestions), and the more they know the less time you will need to spend as a large group. As students work in their small group you can assess the person picking the season (is he/she answering the questions correctly) and the children trying to guess what season it is.

Rationale for including music: The use of the song in this lesson helps to reinforce the lesson in a fun, creative way. The song allows for endless verses and is "catchy" enough that children are likely to sing it at home, making up new verses with their families The song and the lesson can also be reinforced by singing it again when the season changes, changing the verses to meet the new season.

1. What Shall we do when we all go out
All go out, all go out
What shall we do when we all go out
When we all go out to play
2. We will jump like jumping jacks
Jumping jacks, Jumping jacks
We will jump like jumping jacks
When we all go out to play
!M. Palmer, MX. Reilly, and C.R. Scott (1988). World of Music (pi 7) Monistown, NJ: Silver
Burdett & Ginn.

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