Fall is full of vibrant colours and special moments: the start of the school year, Thanksgiving, Halloween, and the time change. This is the perfect opportunity to relate school concepts to the season and decorate your classroom for the occasion. Check out our top suggestions for celebrating fall in elementary school classrooms.
Fall brings with it bright canopies and the joy of crunching leaves under our feet. The changing leaves offer a great opportunity to do fall-related activities with your class and learn outdoors.
 | 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. You can search online to find educational activities for creating a herbarium with your class! |
 | Teach place values with natural materials like fallen leaves, twigs, pebbles, or pinecones. |
 | Identify symmetries in leaves. Have your students collect a variety of fallen leaves and identify the natural symmetries in their specimens. |
 | Measure the angles between the main leaf vein (also known as the midrib) and the secondary leaf veins. |
 | Arrange the 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:
 | Introduce your students to telling time on a clock. This printable teaching clock is a great tool for reviewing the basics of telling time. It even includes turnkey exercises. |
 | 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. |
 | Look at the sky. Our concept sheet on stars and galaxies includes a printable star finder, along with instructions on how to use it—something students can do in the evening at home. |
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 leaves that are still in good condition. |
 | 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. |
 | 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. |
 | Assign your students seasonal spelling words to practise in Magimot or Voca (links in French). You can create your own list of fall-related words and share the code with your students. The same code works for both Magimot and Voca. |
Discover other activities and resources to help you save time and support your students every day!