Acorn Learning Activities

There are so many fun objects that can be used as inspiration for learning activities in the fall. We’ve covered apples and pumpkins; another favorite is acorns. The squirrels in our neighborhood have been super busy so it must be time to talk about acorn learning activities.

Match uppercase and lower case letters on acorn halves with this cute printable from Playdough to Plato. You can do more letter recognition by feeding the squirrel the acorn letters from ABCs of Literacy. You could also use these letters for spelling sight words, in a sensory box or in lots of other ways.

Mrs. Merry has a super cute printable acorn creature you can print out for kids to build. Great cutting and pasting practice, too. Or make a more natural looking acorn with torn or cut construction paper and the printable from The Holly Dog Blog.

Seam Whisperer has super cute squirrel and acorn printable lacing cards, which are a great way to practice fine motor skills. (You’ll want to laminate them and/or print on cardstock to make them more stable for little hands.)

Check out this list of kids books about acorns from Homeschool Preschool.

Want to do activities with actual acorns? Head to the yard or the playground and gather up all you can find, then you can count them (Happy Toddler Playtime), paint them (Learn with Play at Home), stack acorn caps on top of an acorn (also Learn with Play at Home), make a wreath (Craftulate) and sort and observe your acorns at the science table (Teaching 2 and 3 Year Olds).

Or you can make a whole sensory bin with acorns as the base, like this one from Learning and Exploring Through Play. Add wooden blocks or tree slices, little animals, real or fake leaves. So much fun to play with!

I don’t know why Pinterest just suddenly decided I needed to see all the content about task cards and task boxes for kids, but these ideas are great for the classroom to keep in centers or have on hand for early finishers. You can also use them at home as quiet bags or boxes for kids to use when younger siblings might be sleeping, or in the car for a non-screen activity.

Let’s take a look at some fine motor skill task cards and how you can use them to teach kids skills while they play.

Pre-K Pages has a nice set of playdough task cards you can use in boxes or bags with a little tray (or they can just work on the table if they are sitting at a table). Working with clay or play dough is a great fine motor skill exercise, or you can add these to your playdough center if you have one to give them a little bit of direction while they work.

Teaching Mama has a bunch of great ideas for fine motor task boxes, from practicing working a glue bottle to threading beads, using clothespins or scissors, dropping water, finger painting and more. There’s a free printable that shows all the task options she talks through in the post if you want to make your own little boxes, or just keep these ideas on hand when you’re ready to add some fine motor fun to your days.

One of the ideas she mentions in that post is working with a hole punch, and Early Learning Ideas has a whole bunch (the urge to write “hole bunch” is strong) of ideas for printables that help kids practice hole punching, whether it’s a strip with circles on it for them to punch or pictures that include circles for punching, these ideas make it a little more fun to practice this important skill.

My Happy Place Teaching has a whole post about using fine motor task boxes in kindergarten, and her paid resource includes more than 100 task ideas with printables. But if you don’t need 100 boxes you can still get some good ideas from this post about different tasks to include and why and when you can use them. She also mentions using them in the morning while you’re busy with kids coming in at different times, which is a great idea.

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