Ronald L, Heckman, age 10, of Allentown PA for his question:

Does Jack Frost color the fall leaves?

The trees begin to lose their summer greenery in the warm days of early fall long before the frosty winter winds blow over the land. Some years the fall colors are bright and vivid and some years they are drab. The dull, drab colors seem to come when the fall weather is warm and very dry. The brightest colors often came when the fall weather is cool and wet. But this does not happen because of the character we call Jack Frost.
This Jack Frost is a very useful character. When we want to explain the ice on the pond, we say that Jack Frost put it there with his icy breath. Jack Frost, we say, freezes the ground with his chilly feet and paints lacy white pictures on the winter window panes. We can imagine him as a tall, thin fellow dripping icicles and breathing frosty blizzards.
This artistic notion, of course, is not really so. The character Jack Frost is just a poetic way of describing the weather. He does not really exist, but it’s fun to imagine him. However, he has nothing to do with the gay colors of the forest trees in the fall. This wonderful display is perhaps just an accident.
The oaks and the elms, the beeches and birches have thin, delicate leaves which can last only through the warm summery season. Come fall, these trees must shed their leaves and get ready for winter. They do this job step by step. First they stop feeding the summery green leaves. This changes the chemicals in the leaves and different chemicals have different colors.
 All through the summer the leaves are full of chlorophyll, which is a green chemical. When the trees stop feeding their leaves, the chlorophyll chemical. break apart and the leaves   are no longer green.
But there were other colored chemicals inside the leaves also. They were hidden from our eyes by the green chlorophyll and now they can show their pretty faces.
The oak leaves now show their carotinoid chemicals of gold and yellow. These same chemicals also color the goldenrod and the zinnia, the oranges and corn and many other yellow and golden fruits and flowers of the plant world. The fall maple leaves show red chemicals and the plum tree shows bluish chemicals that were hiding there under the summer green chlorophyll. Soon all these colored chemicals break down and the dead, dry leaves fall to the ground.
The trees that lose their leaves in the fall have been doing this for countless ales. They do what their ancestors did, and this is how they live through changing seasons. You might move a maple tree from, Pennsylvania to, say Mexico where Jack Frost never blows his icy breath. Come fall, that maple tree will shed it leaves just as its ancestors did.