Mini-Unit on "Why Do Leaves Change Color?"

I put together a mini-unit for three days of study on why leaves change color in the autumn. It was really fun and my tutoring student especially enjoyed the videos! Here's each day of the plan and the materials you'll need. Most of them are for sale on TeachersPayTeachers, but the book was from a subscription to Reading A-Z. You could probably easily substitute another book and make your own comprehension questions if you don't have a subscription.

The main goal I was trying to work on was reading comprehension, but this also built in a little bit of science as well.

Day 1

The first thing I did was show the student this video as an introduction to the topic. I wanted to capture the student's attention/interest, and give a visual preview of what we were going to be reading about. The student said, "Dude, that was sick!" after watching it...haha, which made me smile and glad that it sparked interest in the topic.

After watching the video, we talked a little about what we saw in the video, and I told the student that we were going to read a book about why that happens. To further prepare for reading, we read a primer passage (pictured below), which is a short written introduction to the topic. The goal of a primer passage is to give the student some background knowledge/context to improve reading comprehension of the book.

We then read the book. For this particular student, we take turns reading one page aloud each.

After reading the book, he completed this "cause and effect" worksheet based on the concepts in the book.

Day 2

For day 2, I used an introduction video as well, but this one goes more in-depth and provides a fun review of the concepts.

After watching the video, we read a one-page passage about the topic and completed the true-false worksheet to go with it. As needed, he looked for answers in the text.

Day 3

For the last day of the mini-unit, we watched another video to spark interest and review the topic.

We then re-read the book from Reading A-Z and did the comprehension quiz.

Extension Activities: