Fall Activities That Build Your Child’s Academic Skills
Originally published on the motherhoodlater.com website
Fall is a festive time of year, filled with colorful leaves, pumpkin flavors, apple cider, and candy corn. It is also a great season for learning! Help your child develop stronger reading, writing, and math skills with the fall-themed activities detailed below.
Reading
Rhyming
Your child can develop stronger phonemic awareness skills – a precursor to reading – with a fall rhyming activity. Think of fall-themed words, like hay, apple, leaf, pumpkin, and cider, and write each word on a flash card. If your child is able to read the words, have them read each word aloud to you; if not, read the words to them and ask them to come up with words that rhyme with each word, then write those words on the back of the flash card. For example, if the word is hay, your child might come up with words that rhyme with hay, like clay, may, day, say, pay, stray, and so on. If your child can write the words on the back of the card themselves, have them do so. If not, you should write them and read the words aloud to them as you point to each word.
Match It!
Build your child’s reading and memory skills with a game of fall-themed Match It! To play this game, come up with ten fall-themed pictures. Either draw them on flash cards using colorful markers (one picture per card) or print the images and paste them onto cards. Then on ten separate cards, write the word that corresponds to each picture. For example, you might have pictures of an apple, pumpkin, ghost, leaf, pie, and so on, each on separate cards, with the corresponding words written on other cards. Then flip all twenty cards upside down and mix them around. Take turns with your child turning over two cards at a time. When your child flips over a word card, ask them to try to read the word aloud, then match it with the corresponding picture card. If they make a match, they get another turn. The player with the most matches wins!
Create a Tree
Your child can work on letter/sound recognition and word reading using an apple tree! To make one, they should use brown construction paper to cut out a long rectangle that will serve as the tree trunk and smaller brown rectangles to serve as the branches. Your child should paste the smaller brown rectangles around the tree trunk. Next, they should use colored construction paper to cut out a mix of 26 small orange, red, and yellow pieces to serve as leaves and paste them onto the branches. Your child can then write each letter of the alphabet on the leaves (or you write the letters for them if they aren’t able to). Have your child tell you the name of each letter and its corresponding sound. Older children can write fall-themed words instead of letters on the colored leaves and can even write a sentence using each word in a separate notebook.
Writing
Sentence Puzzles
Have fun working on writing skills with your child using fall-themed sentence puzzles. Come up with a series of sentences that involve fall themes, like:
I love apple picking.
Pumpkin pie is the best dessert.
My mom’s favorite drink is apple cider.
Colorful leaves are beautiful.
Then write one word from each sentence on separate flash cards. Mix the cards around face-up on a table and have your child put the words together to form a complete sentence. Then they can rewrite each sentence in a separate notebook and read them aloud to you.
Fall Writing Journals
To further develop your child’s writing skills, have them create a fall writing journal. Start by doing a fun fall activity with them, like baking pumpkin muffins, going for a nature walk and finding colorful leaves, or picking apples. Then have your child write about the experience in their fall journal. Encourage them to include as many details as possible, like sights and smells they noticed when doing the activity, who they were with, what time of day it was, and how they felt at the end of the activity. The more they can practice writing, the better!
Math
Leaf Sorting
Fall is a great time to work on math skills! Go for a walk with your child and have them collect a mix of different colored leaves. Then work on sorting them by creating a three-column chart labeled orange, red, and yellow. Have your child glue the orange leaves in the orange column, the red leaves in the red column, and the yellow leaves in the yellow column. You can then have them count up how many of each colored leaf they collected and write that number at the button of each column. Discuss greater/less than concepts, like which colored leaf they have the most or least of, and how many more of one color they have than another.
Pumpkin Seed Math
You can further work on math concepts using pumpkin seeds. Go to a pumpkin patch with your child and pick a pumpkin, then carve it and save the seeds for a fall math activity. Alternatively, you can buy pumpkin seeds if that’s easier. Work on basic addition and subtraction concepts with your child using the pumpkin seeds. For example, you might ask them to pull out three pumpkin seeds, then four more. Have them count up all of the pumpkin seeds and tell you the total. Then use a mini white board or sheet of paper to write the corresponding math problem: 3+4=7. You can use this same process to practice subtraction, multiplication, and division problems, all using pumpkin seeds.
Baking!
Fall is a fun time for baking. Make apple pie or another fall dessert with your child while working on math skills. Have them measure out the ingredients for the recipe to work on fraction concepts. Ask them how much of each ingredient they would need if the recipe was cut in half or doubled. You can even have them write out fraction problems, like if the recipe calls for 1/4 cup of brown sugar and they are doubling the recipe, they might write out 1/4 + 1/4 and then solve that fraction problem to come up with the total amount of brown sugar needed for the doubled recipe.
Fall is a great time for festive and fun activities. Take advantage of this time to build your child’s academic skills while enjoying the season.