Fall Unit: Pre-K 5/K

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Ana's Week

This year, I decided to do fall a little bit later in the semester to try and hit the season at just the right time and seemed to succeed. Fall happens a bit later in south Georgia, and covering it right before Thanksgiving appeared to give me a good overlap of appropriate activities for both holidays. The week was terribly rainy, but we lucked out and chose to do our fall walk on Sunday so we had leaves and seeds to sort, even if they ended up being a bit brown by the time we got to them.


By far, the best part of the week was the short bit we were able to spend walking in nature and enjoying the beauty of fall. We did both a scavenger hunt and a fall leaf/seed walk, so the girls stayed busy the whole walk looking for things to collect or check of their list. That meant, there were no complaints about being tired or wanting to head back, which is always a win!


I divided the days into: apples, fall as a whole, leaves, pumpkins, and hibernation/migration. We also went over to a friend’s house one day for co-op and did really fun fall crafts like fall leaf handprints and creating leaf people, which was a fun break for both myself and the girls. I’ve really enjoyed having help once a week with coming up with crafts and activities from my co-op, and it is always more fun going on field trips when you have friends to join you! If you can even find just one friend who will start a co-op with you, it makes the journey a little less lonely.


Anyways, for apple day we played in an apple pie sensory bin, made apple orchard frames, counted apple seeds, did apple STEM, and made coffee filter apples. We also did a basic introduction to fall and its months on Monday with rewriting a fall poem (one of the great activities in the Autumn nature journal I mention) and the seasons wheel we made a few years back.


For leaf day, Aria made words out of letters written on pinewood discs, seed rubbings and sorting, salt  crystal leaves (which didn’t turn out but if they turn out for you, please tell me what I did wrong!!), leaf rubbing, and pressing leaves. We also made coffee filter leaves and hung them to make a harvest banner with the apple coffee filters.


Even though we already covered pumpkins with halloween, we went back and did a few more additional activities and covered parts of the pumpkin more thoroughly (plus, dissecting anything is always fun). We made foam pumpkin and gourd crafts from Michael’s, coloring pages, and some miscellaneous pumpkin worksheets.


Lastly, we covered hibernation and migration with some friends who came over. We put a big tent in our living room so the kiddos could pretend to hibernate and created a hibernation sensory bin with leaves and other fall items, bears and squirrels, and boxes/paper towel rolls we painted to be our caves or logs where the animals hibernated. For migration, we wanted to do a bird walk but it was raining, so we talked about how and why bird migrate and had the kids draw birds in a “V” shape. I also sung the kiddos a rap song and did a chant about different animals and whether they hibernate or migrate, which the kids seemed to enjoy!


Overall, fall is a fun and important week. By not doing it earlier in the season, we missed overlapping with certain fall events like festivals or visiting the pumpkin patch, but I don’t think we were so far off from the field trips that the girls had already forgotten what we had seen. I think fall is just the best season of the year (other than the single good month of Winter, December :)), so it was fun spending some time celebrating the beauty of nature and God’s creation with two little ones who are still so excited about everything! Already looking forward to the return of fall fun next year! ​

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