With a chill in the air, birds flying south, and leaves putting on a blazing color show, it’s time for baking, raking, and settling in! French author Albert Camus once said, "Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower." It’s also a great time to make use of the season for inspired learning—in between piling up all those “flowers.”
For tools, resources, and creative ideas on how to capture the cozy, colorful spirit of fall and help kids jump into the season with both feet, keep reading!
Change in season, adventure in learning
A post earlier this month pointed out some overall benefits of seasonal learning and holiday-themed activities. For example, it helps make abstract concepts more relatable and builds connections across subjects. More specifically, autumn-themed lessons can:
• Teach life cycles and change: Autumn offers a natural way to discuss growth, transformation, and the passage of time. The video “The Life Cycle of Apple Trees” can add to the discussion and understanding. It’s one of four in the Exploring Nature series on School Zone’s Anywhere Teacher online learning program.
• Sharpen observation skills: Nature walks and scavenger hunts spark inquiry and close looking. A single maple leaf can display striking colors and patterns. A flock of geese flying in a V-formation can prompt discussion of migration, yes, but also community, teamwork, and leadership. Fall colors can bring on the same oohs and aahs as summer fireworks. During a drive, get kids studying the tree lines and see who can spot the most spectacularly colored tree!
• Inspire imagination: Fall colors, textures, and traditions encourage storytelling, art, and play—sometimes combining all three! Cuddle up with a book like The Leaf Thief, Fletcher and the Falling Leaves, or The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s First Fall. Caitlin Marie Design has compiled “50+ Best Fall Books for Kids to Read Aloud This Season,” noting they include Thanksgiving picks. For art ideas, see below.
• Boost creativity: Pumpkins, leaves, and apples are all recognizable to kids as signs of fall and all that goes with it. Get them thinking about what they might want to “do” with each. Paint pumpkins or gourds? Make or buy caramel apples? According to Redbook, fall was once called a Middle English word meaning “harvest,” and few things say harvest like a walk through a farmers’ market this time of year, with the smells and sights of the season’s bounty. For example, concord grapes have it all: rich color, taste, and smell (along with those pesky seeds!) Let kids pick out some standard fare basics and some novelties.
Literacy & Math Fall Activities
The fall harvest should include lots of engaging reading, writing, and math activities, too. Here are just a few:
• Autumn Story Starter – Encourage kids to create their own stories with prompts like “A squirrel’s busy day” or “The pumpkin that grew too big.” Coming up with the story develops creative writing, vocabulary, critical thinking, and sequencing/story order skills. The phrase “fall literacy activities” sounds formal, but one option can be as easy as encouraging kids to tell a story!
• Acorn Addition & Subtraction - Use real acorns or tokens to solve simple math problems. The Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) website offers a variety of low-cost acorn math activities. Wunder Kiddy offers a Acorn Counting Activity that involves downloading a PDF and cutting out a set of acorns and some fall leaves flash cards with numbers.
• Leaf Counting - Paint numbers onto leaves and arrange them in ascending or descending order or use them for number recognition games. For more leaf fun, Kids Craft Room posted a Fine Motor Counting Activity that lets kids collect and count leaves while also developing fine motor skills! They say, “all you need is a couple of shallow baskets, some clothespins, a Sharpie pen, and lots of lovely leaves.” Fall math activities for kids make learning feel like pure play!
• Autumn Word Mats - Create word mats with seasonal vocabulary word lists that include words like "leaf," "acorn," "pumpkin," and "harvest." (You can go out and collect the objects after if time allows). Word mats are good visual aids that help build vocabulary, spelling, reading, and writing. Some are just word lists, and others have pictures to go with them. A number of AI-generated or downloadable templates for word mats are available online. Some use fall words, and others use fall-themed illustrations for wordplay, like this Fall Leaves Theme CVC Words Word Building Mat for beginning readers from Life Over C’s.
As useful as the season is for reading and math enrichment, autumn themes apply across the entire curriculum! And the related activities work as autumn classroom ideas or at-home projects.
Art, science, and social studies activities
• ART: Leaf rubbings, pumpkin painting, and apple stamping are a trio of classics. Generations of kids have placed fallen leaves under a piece of paper and rubbed a crayon (with the label peeled off) over them to reveal the shape and veins of the leaves. Use different colored crayons.
Pumpkin painting is pretty self-explanatory, but Montessori Art offers some good tips for home and classroom, and Aubree Originals offers up Easy Painted Pumpkins: How to Paint Simple Monster Faces.
With a few how-to's, apple stamping is also super easy, Crafts by Courtney provides some. In addition to those classics, Table Life Blog put together 10 Fantastically Fun Fall Art Projects, and Sophia Moon posted Autumn-Inspired Art Projects With Kids! to Boston Moms.
• SCIENCE: Take nature walks and do scavenger hunts for sorting and classifying leaves, nuts, and other “drops” by color, size, or type. Here’s a fun and easy fall scavenger hunt for younger kids from Toddler Approved and a Fall Scavenger Hunt Printable from Highlights. Just Google: fall scavenger hunts to uncover an amazingly wide variety.
Why and how do leaves change color? Here’s an easy explanation from the Smithsonian. Or check out this detailed and colorful video from News 9 in Oklahoma that also addresses how the weather influences leaf color, as does this article from Michigan State University.
For a different science lesson and discussion, look skyward at dusk. Why are fall sunsets so vivid? As TV station WCNC in Charlotte, NC, tells us, “Fall brings some of the most breathtaking sunrises and sunsets of the year — and there’s science behind the spectacle.” The reasons include the position of the sun and cleaner, cooler air.
• SOCIAL STUDIES: Explore harvest traditions in the U.S. and around the world. What do they share in common? What’s different? For example, the U.S. is the world’s largest producer of corn, most of it used for livestock feed and ethanol. Pomegranates originated in the Middle East but are now grown in India, China, Iran, Turkey, and California. Olives are grown in California, but also in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Georgia, and parts of the Middle East.
The Spruce Eats website published Fall Fruits and Vegetables: What’s in Season in Fall? It’s an alpha list of lots of yummies, both ordinary and less so. Have kids join you in hunting some of them down in the produce section while grocery shopping and giving them a try, or as noted earlier, visiting your local farmers’ market.
And here 25 Fascinating Pumpkin Facts from Barton Hill Farms. They tell us that pumpkins are grown on every continent except Antarctica, and multiple sources say that the full moon that occurs near the autumn equinox is called a harvest moon, because prior to electricity, its light helped farmers harvest their crops.
Learning Fun with School Zone Resources
Learning materials that highlight or tie in with fall themes make great picks!
Here are a few from School Zone:
• Anywhere Teacher, our online learning program for ages 2-8, has super fun farm- and seasonally themed games and activities like Pig & Friends Count by Tens, Letters on the Farm, Numbers on the Farm, Farmer Cyrus’ Circles, Exploring Nature: The Life Cycle of Apple Trees, Golden Acres, Autumn's Acorn Acres, and among the writables/printables are some with fall themes, for example, Spanish & English Dot-to-Dots A-Z Fall.
• Flash cards & card games include Farm Animal Rummy Card Game, Memory Match Farm Card Game, and Slap Jack Farm Card Game. Or use the words from Sight Words Flash Cards to drop into fall-illustrated word mats mentioned earlier.
• A workbook like Color By Letter Farm Fun Workbook delivers lots of farm-themed fun. It’s a color-by-numbers format that uses letters instead! Kids practice uppercase and lowercase letter recognition, but also learn to follow directions, improve focus, develop fine motor skills, and stretch their imagination.
Wise Owl Tips for Fall Learning Success
Anything we make part of our daily routine creates consistent opportunities to develop skills and build confidence and feels more natural than putting it on a schedule or calendar. That includes fun fall activities for students! Here are a few strategies for weaving threads of autumn into the fabric of daily routines:
• Incorporate nature walks into reading/science lessons (and vice-versa).
• Use fall items (apples, pumpkins, leaves) for hands-on math.
• Read seasonal books together for literacy practice.
• Keep activities short and interactive for maximum engagement.
Harvest the power of fall for learning
Fall bridges the hot days of summer and the cold days of winter, the get-ready-for-school of August and the hunker-down-for-holidays of November. Whatever weather it brings, wherever you live, it’s a beautiful transition.
The season is full of opportunities for fall learning activities that connect play, discovery, and academics. Whether through reading, math, or science, autumn brings endless inspiration. Explore SchoolZone.com for more resources that help make the season both fun and educational.
