Activities to Celebrate Fall with Your Elementary School Class

Fall brings with it bright canopies and the joy of crunching leaves under our feet. The changing leaves offer a great opportunity to draw connections between the fall season and the topics you’re studying in class. 

• Create a herbarium. This activity combines art and science. It’s perfect for budding botanists in Cycles 2 and 3. In preparation for the activity, review Alloprof’s concept sheets on plant growth and seasons and the anatomy of plants, as well as the exercises recommended at the bottom of both sheets. In addition, before exploring plant anatomy in nature, it’s a good idea to go over the scientific method with your class using this anchor chart.
  There are many different ways to create a herbarium. Here are a few resources you can consult for inspiration (all resources in French): 
  • Mon herbier de classe
  • L’identification d’arbres, clé en main LES
  • Instructions for making a flower press and herbarium
• Do math. Fall is a great time for playing and learning outside, and many math activities lend themselves well to outdoor learning. Here are a few ideas you can try:
  • Teach place values with natural materials like fallen leaves, twigs, pebbles, or pinecones. First, put out three containers (one for the hundreds place, one for the tens place, and one for the ones place). Then, you and your students will take turns calling out numbers while the other students place their natural materials in the correct containers to represent the number.
  • Identify symmetries in leaves. Have your students collect a variety of fallen leaves and identify the natural symmetries in their specimens. Then, have them cut the leaves in half along the central vein and glue one of the halves to a sheet of paper. Lastly, they will draw and colour in the other half of the leaf, trying to make it as symmetrical as possible.
  • Measure the angles between the main leaf vein (also known as the midrib) and the secondary leaf veins.
  • Arrange leaves in ascending or descending order according to their size.  

During fall, the days begin to grow shorter. You can connect this phenomenon to scientific concepts in the elementary school curriculum. Here are a few examples of activities:  

• Explain what the fall equinox is and why the days grow shorter after this point. While this concept sheet was designed for high schoolers, you can use it to introduce topics related to the seasons to your elementary schoolers. 

•  Use the return to standard time as an opportunity to review telling time and explain why we “fall back” when daylight saving time ends. This printable teaching clock is a great tool for reviewing the basics of telling time. It even includes turnkey exercises.
• You could also do an experiment by building a sundial with your class (see bottom of page).
• Observe and identify clouds. Although clouds are present in all seasons, fall can be an especially good time to observe the sky. Learning to identify clouds will enable your students to predict the weather without any meteorological instruments, as well as draw connections with the water cycle. You can do this activity over the course of a few days to observe different weather conditions and see which clouds appear in different types of weather. You can also encourage your students to make sketches of the clouds they observe.

A great way to celebrate fall is by encouraging your students to learn to spell seasonal words. Here are some activities you could try:

• Create an autumnal word wall using colourful fall leaves. Take your class on a short walk outside and ask your students to collect a variety of fallen leaves that are still in good condition. Then, have them write vocabulary words on the leaves in permanent marker. You could also laminate the leaves and write on them in dry erase marker.
• Play Potager en péril during the Halloween season. During the month of October, our popular parts of speech game gets a spooky makeover with Halloween-themed tunnels and costumed characters. For even more ideas, read our article on tips for celebrating Halloween with your class.
• Learn seasonal vocabulary words in Nehlueun and English. Both of these resources include vocabulary words, their pronunciation, and a corresponding picture to facilitate comprehension.
• Explore vocabulary words related to Thanksgiving in our library of English vocabulary sheets.
• Assign your students seasonal spelling words to practise in Magimot or our interactive vocabulary exercise (link in French). We’ve put together our own spelling list to get you started. Here’s the code: iMfMgHsTwBcdy4tejPvfyw