Enhanced – with website links
all is my favorite time of year! I live in the South, so our summers are long and hot. Every year, my family and I look forward to autumn when the days are cooler, the mosquitoes have (hopefully) gone away, and, for many families, homeschool is back in session.
There are lots of autumn learning activities that can help make getting back to school something you and your children look forward to. As you’re doing these activities, use the ideas to come up with even more ideas of your own!
If you have younger children or want to make this activity simpler, write acrostics. Simply choose an autumn-related word such as apple, autumn, leaves, hot chocolate, etc. Write the word(s) going down the side of the page. Then write an autumn-related word beginning with each of the letters.
If you’d like to make it a little more challenging, write haiku, free verse, or another type of poetry. Make it serious, make it informational, but be sure to make it fun!
2. Go on a nature walk.
While you’re walking, pay attention to the plants and animals you see. Look at bugs and birds. Notice the landscape.
When you get home, write poems or short stories about the plants, animals, and areas you observed while you were on your walk.
You may even want to go on nature walks once a week and make notes of the changes in temperature and weather and the different kinds of plants and animals you see so you can compare them or graph them.
3. Make fall leaf creatures.
Collect some beautifully colored fall leaves and make fall leaf creatures! Make animals just for the fun of it, or create them and write short stories or poems that include your leaf creatures as the stars of your stories. Or you might want to create cards to give as gifts to friends or relatives or patients at a local nursing home.
all is my favorite time of year! I live in the South, so our summers are long and hot. Every year, my family and I look forward to autumn when the days are cooler, the mosquitoes have (hopefully) gone away, and, for many families, homeschool is back in session.
There are lots of autumn learning activities that can help make getting back to school something you and your children look forward to. As you’re doing these activities, use the ideas to come up with even more ideas of your own!
If you have younger children or want to make this activity simpler, write acrostics. Simply choose an autumn-related word such as apple, autumn, leaves, hot chocolate, etc. Write the word(s) going down the side of the page. Then write an autumn-related word beginning with each of the letters.
If you’d like to make it a little more challenging, write haiku, free verse, or another type of poetry. Make it serious, make it informational, but be sure to make it fun!
2. Go on a nature walk.
While you’re walking, pay attention to the plants and animals you see. Look at bugs and birds. Notice the landscape.
When you get home, write poems or short stories about the plants, animals, and areas you observed while you were on your walk.
You may even want to go on nature walks once a week and make notes of the changes in temperature and weather and the different kinds of plants and animals you see so you can compare them or graph them.
3. Make fall leaf creatures.
Collect some beautifully colored fall leaves and make fall leaf creatures! Make animals just for the fun of it, or create them and write short stories or poems that include your leaf creatures as the stars of your stories. Or you might want to create cards to give as gifts to friends or relatives or patients at a local nursing home.
Look up information about preserving fall leaves and give it a try! Or do a science experiment about how and why leaves change color in the fall. This article, Fall Science Experiment: Use Chromatography to Extract Color from Green Leaves, is one you might want to consider.
5. Make a beautiful fall lantern to display.
Make some beautiful fall lanterns. I remember spending an afternoon with my daughter a few years ago making some beautiful fall lanterns. Now she has graduated from our homeschool and is getting ready to move out on her own, so I cherish those memories.
Start with a glass vase or jar or container and then use Mod Podge to add fall leaves to the vessel. The result will be a lovely autumn lantern you can display in your home or outdoors.
Each autumn, I look forward to displaying the lovely autumn lanterns we created together. They not only bring back happy memories, but they also remind me of how much God loves each of us. After all, He created such lovely colors for us to enjoy every autumn!
6. If you have young children, try a fun preschool math activity.
It can be fun and easy to get young children excited about preschool math! Let them go outside to pick out some fall leaves. Then make dots on each leaf with a permanent marker. Finally, use rocks or slips of paper and write numbers to correspond with the numbers of dots on each leaf. This Preschool Leaf Math activity gives you all the details.
7. Play autumn games.
If you have young children (honestly, even older kids will probably enjoy this), make an autumn bingo game! You can use it to teach your kids to pay attention, to get your children interested in fall and the plants and animals we typically associate with this season, and to teach your children to take turns, follow instructions, and more!
If you don’t want to make up your own autumn-related bingo game, try this Fall Fun Bingo Game!
Or try this Fall Read, Write, and Count the Room activity. It’s perfect for a fall day when your kids need something active to do inside the house! They’ll be actively exploring, reading, matching, counting, and more—and it’s all autumn-themed.
8. Try a LEGO challenge.
So many kids love LEGO! Why not capitalize on that love and do a fall LEGO challenge?
Make up your own challenges in which you come up with autumn-related words (like pumpkin, apple, black cat, or candy corn) and have your kids try to make them out of LEGO.
Or you may want to download this fall LEGO challenge!
9. Do some apple-related math and science activities.
Grab some red and green apples and do some math and science experiments.
Check to see if lemon, baking soda, milk, water, or vinegar will help keep apples from browning the most. If you don’t want to come up with your own experiments, try these Fun and Tasty Ways to Experiment with Apples.
Or try some math activities with apples. Draw apple trees and have your children use bits of playdough to represent apples. Count the number of red apples as compared to the number of green apples. Make addition and subtraction problems using your red and green apples.
Print these Fun on the Farm with Apple Tree Math playdough mats. Your kids can use them to practice addition, to learn how addition problems can be “reversed” to make subtraction problems, to talk about colors and mix colors, to work on fine motor skills, and more.
10. Study the life cycle of an apple.
Do a unit study about the Life Cycle of an Apple. Come up with your own or use this unit study. It includes links to STEM apple experiments, a science experiment about oxidation of apples, and other fun apple-related ideas and activities.
Here’s a bonus apple idea: Practice following directions and put your kids’ math skills to the test by making some fun and Gorgeous Apple Tree Cupcakes. This is a fun way to learn about apples, math, and baking all at the same time!
endy Hilton is an introverted extrovert who lives in the South. She’s been married to Scott, her high school sweetheart, for thirty years, and they have two adult children and one teenager who all homeschooled. She loves writing and editing, reading, and working out and teaching classes at her local gym. She also loves Jesus, her family, homeschooling, and her dog. To read more from Wendy, visit one of the websites she co-owns along with Trish Corlew. You’ll find her at Hip Homeschool Moms, Only Passionate Curiosity, and Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.