Fun Fall Activities for Kindergarten

It’s beginning to look a lot like… fall! I love the changing seasons and in New England where I live, I look forward to the leaves changing color every year! This year… fall kind of snuck up on me! But now that the leaves are changing, I’m ready to start some fun fall activities with my students! If you like the activities you see here, you can check them out on my Teachers Pay Teachers store. I have a bundle of apple activities and a bundle for pumpkin activities, including new digital fall activities for kindergarten!

Fall Books

These are some of my favorite fall books! I have so many fall books that I separated out apple books and pumpkin books. For your convenience, I have put my favorite books in a list on my Amazon storefront.

Fall Leaves

I love starting fall with activities on leaves! One of the best starting science lessons for the year is learning about observational drawing (drawing scientifically – exactly what we see in front of us) is with leaves. We go on a quick walk outside and everyone brings in one leaf. Then we do an observational drawing with it.

I also love any kind of playful activity to connect to our learning. Using this amazing book, Leaf Man by Louis Ehlert, students could create pictures with leaves and other natural materials found outside. Once they created a leaf picture, they used Seesaw to take a picture of their work and tell the story of the leaf. The students came up with the most creative stories and creations!

Apples

Many students, especially in New England, spend at least one weekend in the fall going apple picking. It is a great time to study apples, because so many of them are thinking about apples and exploring with them! I love to study the life cycle (one of our repeated themes throughout the year in kindergarten) and the different parts of the apple.

At our school, we do not give students food. But if you are at home or at a school where you can share food, having students taste test different types of apples is such a fun activity! While we don’t taste the apples, we do carefully observe the outside and inside of different kinds of apples. I love letting my students “dissect” the apple to see the different parts of the apple.

One of my favorite activities includes another topic we will study later in the year… water! The students have so much fun predicting whether apples will sink or float and then finding out the results! You can actually watch our experiment on IGTV!

Comparing Fall Foods

I do many of the same things I do with apples, with pumpkins. I love to then compare the two foods! This is a freebie in my store if you want to compare what you have learned with your students!

Pumpkins

Before starting my lessons on the pumpkin’s life cycle, and parts of the pumpkin, I really like to surprise my students with something they might not know. I bring in a member of the gourd family and don’t tell them what it is. I love hearing their ideas of what it could be! Then, I follow their lead when they inevitably ask me to cut it open and see what’s inside. Once we have explored the inside and observed the object, we do a little research to discover it is like a pumpkin, but it in fact is not a pumpkin. Then we learn about the gourd family.

After studying the gourd family, we dive in to pumpkins. Whenever possible, I bring in pumpkins of different shapes and sizes and colors. I’m grateful that parents often volunteer to supply the classroom with these, and when not sometimes local farms will let me have a discount or a free pumpkin for my classroom!

Connecting Fall to other Areas

I love sharing these emergent readers with my students to learn more about the parts of the apple and pumpkin and the life cycle. Plus, we can practice a sight word with them! And now that they are digital, there are so many ways to share them with students! (Check out the digital apple products and the digital pumpkin products here!)

When studying both apples and pumpkins, it could be fun to turn your dramatic play into an apple orchard or a pumpkin farm to sell apple or pumpkin products to customers. I also love to include leaf, apple and pumpkin games into math when we are studying them in science.

Conclusion

I hope you love these fall activities for kindergarten as much as I do! They are super easy and the children are very engaged while exploring these topics!  Let me know which one is your favorite!

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