The new school year is underway, and the leaves are changing in color, meaning it’s officially fall. You might have noticed the air becoming cooler, but not enough to pull out heavy jackets. With the changing of the seasons, you may wonder what activities you can incorporate into your lesson plans to engage students further.
We’ve got you covered with these must-try activities for the fall season!
Create Paper Mache Pumpkins
One thing that’s often associated with fall is pumpkins. Thus, what better way to bring fall into your classroom than by prompting your students to create their own paper mache pumpkins? They can be any size and any color, but we understand there has to be an educational aspect to this project.
While students are making their pumpkins, you can walk students through the life cycle of pumpkins as a part of the science lesson you’ve created. Detail for them how pumpkins start as seeds and grow on a vine along the ground. As the pumpkin continues to grow, it will bloom from the plant until the pumpkins are ready to be detached from the vine.
Fall Graphing Equations
It’s not uncommon for some children to be hesitant about completing math problems, but what if we told you that you could use fall activities to bring a few math concepts to life? The way this activity works is you describe to students the idea of a graphing bar.
In this activity, they’ll measure the amount of color change each leaf has taken on. After you explain the rules of the activity, the next step is to take the kids outside to collect leaves for the activity. Once they’ve collected enough leaves, each student should select five and begin to graph them using their graphing worksheet. Students will organize the leaves from the least to the most changed on this bar graph.
You can also teach students how to calculate each leaf's percentage of change as the leaf changes from green to red, yellow, or orange.
Leafin’ Into Literacy
Another excellent activity is to enter the world of poetry while bringing in some aspects of fall. You can title this activity “Fun in the Fall.” Task students with gathering various colored pieces of paper to mimic fall colors and cut them into the shapes of leaves.
Then, move forward with teaching them how to construct a poem. The lesson will teach them how to write poems, which will be written on their leaves.
Once they’ve completed the lesson, the next step is to take their “leaves” and hang them on the tree. This is a wonderfully interactive way to get students to broaden their minds and learn about a different genre of literacy they might not have known about before.
These are just a few activities you can choose to use in your classroom as a part of the fall theme. In education, one thing we’re sure you know is that sometimes the best way to get students to grasp a concept is to approach it using a different and more interactive method.
Want more tips and tricks like what you’ve found above? Don’t forget to keep an eye on the Gallopade blog for more useful educational tools.