Seasons – Fall

September 10, 2018 /

We had so much fun learning about fall! Living in New England it was so easy to go around and check out the leaves beginning to change colors as we get ready for “leaf peeper” season (when all the tourists flock to New England to see the leaves change). We took a great walk around our neighborhood and the “big” kids were able to collect lots of random leaves, flowers, and pine needles they found along the ground.

We talked a lot about how the leaves change color and fall to the ground and were able to use some of the leaves we found on our “nature walk” to see the different colors! I saved some of what they found so that we can use it for art projects during the week too. They had so much fun feeling all the different textures from smooth to prickly to crunchy and learning names for things like leaves, bark, flowers, grass. As we looked around we even got to see a bumblebee & a few butterflies which was really exciting and all my toddler could talk about when Dad got home was how the bumblebee flew away!

One of the things we are going to do for each of our season days is create a letter with some of the things that we found on our little nature treasure hunt. I cut out a small square (fold the paper in half so you only have to cut once) and then cut out each letter that I wanted. I then put contact paper over it so that the cut out part was sticky. I decided to do the letters for each of my kids names, but you could also do the alphabet to work on more letter recognition! I’m also thinking I should’ve used a stencil to make the letters look a little nicer, but lets be honest my two year old didn’t notice! Today the kids were able to stick fall colored leaves – red, yellow, brown on to create their “fall” letters and then I tapped another square on the back to hold everything in. Make sure you do tape on all the sides and corners so that things don’t fall out! I love this project because its basically mess free (I don’t have my kids tasting glue or smearing it all over the house) but if you have an older kid who is fine with gluing you could skip the contact paper and just outline a letter for them to fill in.

 

We continued our fall theme at lunch by having the kids help me husk some corn on the cob that we got from our CSA. While my two year old just loves to help Mommy cook – my one year old thought it was a fun game to say that the corn was hiding and she had to find it under the leaves! This was such an easy and fun fall project for them that kept them busy while I made the rest of their lunch that I think I’m going to have to start incorporating more corn into our diet.

Another thing we do every fall is to clean & bring our water table inside and use it to create a sensory table. Since it’s so warm out here still we decided to hold off but come cooler weather I have a bunch of decorative leaves that I put in with a couple of small rakes (from our beach toys) and let the kids rake and hide a couple giant lady bugs or play apples for them to find. They really have a lot of fun with it! A big tupperware or storage box also works great for this if you don’t want to spend $$ on a water table or if you want something more portable.

 

After our nap today the babes wanted to do a little more arts and crafts so I made them each a blank tree. I literally just drew a bunch of brown lines on a paper – so easy! If that’s not your thing though just print off any tree without leaves you can find on google and voila! We took out some of our dot art set and continued to talk about what color leaves we see on the trees in fall. They were able to pick those colors to decorate their trees with and did fairly well trading them back and forth when they wanted a new color. My oldest decided to make his an apple tree and did lots of red dots for the apples, while my youngest was pretty content with trying to figure out which side of pen would give her the stamp and which wouldn’t.  Again this was such a simple art activity that even my one year old could easily be included and make an awesome fall tree as you can see. Actually, they all turned out so great I might have to try to do one for each season!

 

 

 

There are so many other activities I’m looking forward to doing with them this fall, but this was a great starter for our seasons week! I’ll save some of it for when fall really hits and we can enjoy all sorts of seasonal activities so keep checking back if you want more. Stay tuned as we embrace Winter next (I don’t even want to think about the snow that’s coming in a few months time) and let me know in the comments how your Fall activities are going!

 

 

 

Seasons - Winter
Seasons: Day One

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