Fall Math Activities for Kids

October 7, 2024 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

There are so many fun themes you can bring to the classroom in the fall, from apples and leaves to pumpkins, acorns, candy corn, witch hats…

Let’s stick to the earlier parts of fall for this roundup of fun fall themed math activities for kids.

123 Homeschool 4 Me has printable playdough mats that allow kids to count, trace the numbers 1-10, spell out the words and build the numbers with dough. Add buttons or other small objects as leaves for the trees they can count as they go.

Understanding patterns is a great basic for understanding math, and these repeating pattern printable cards from Taming Little Monsters are super cute as well as educational. There are six pages with four different patterns on each page and you can use them at home or in a math center at school. Or try the dot dabbing repeating pattern apple page from Tot Schooling, which uses different colors of apples in a row so kids can complete the pattern with dot markers.

Practice one-to-one correspondence with the leaf number tower activity from Fun Learning for Kids. This one uses domino style shapes with dots and kids build towers with cubes to the same height as the numbers on the leaf. That makes it a good fine motor skill activity, too.

Match the numbers on leaves to the numbers on the trees with this leaf number sorting activity from A Dab of Glue Will Do. This is a great one for the math center, and you could also use pom poms or other manipulatives to add “leaves” to the trees if you want.

That’s a similar idea to these printable tree math mats (which could be used other times of year, too) from The Kindergarten Connection. Write a simple math problem at the bottom (or roll a die to get the numbers) that kids can solve by adding or subtracting leaves. You could also use acorns, pom poms, buttons or any other little small thing you have handy.

Play a math game with apples from Playdough to Plato and kids can practice graphing and counting to see which apple comes out on top.

Older kids can practice multiplication with these color by math facts pages from Math with Raven. These are perfect for third and fourth graders learning their multiplication tables, as they will color all the problems with the same solution the same color to reveal the fall leaves.

Christmas Themed Math Activities

Snowflake Themed Math Activities

Thanksgiving Math Activities

Dr. Seuss Math Activities

Shamrock Math Games and Activities

Easy Valentine’s Day Math Activities

Have you read?

Books About Bugs Through the Seasons

Growing Up Ladybug and How to Become a Butterfly are both by Stepanka Sekaninova and illustrated by Linh Dao, and they came out at the same time and are on similar themes, so let’s look at them together.

Growing Up Ladybug is narrated by Mariella, a seven-spot ladybug. She talks about the parts of a ladybug, where they live, different kinds of ladybugs, why humans love them, their defenses against predators and the life cycle of a ladybug.

The drawings are cute if not always scientifically accurate, it’s not in such a way that’s likely to confuse kids (who probably already know that ladybug mamas don’t push their larval babies around in strollers, for instance.

It’s a good general description of the life cycle of a lady bug and why we like having them around.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Similarly, How to Become a Butterfly covers the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with caterpillars eating burning nettle leaves. (Here Amanda is the narrator.) The book talks about a few of the more than 18,000 daytime butterflies in the world as well as other creatures that live in the meadow (there’s that ladybug again, along with crickets, bees and other bugs).

It also covers some of the enemies of caterpillars like wasps and spiders, and the defenses that caterpillars use to try to prevent being eaten. It illustrates how caterpillars grow and change as they molt and prepare to pupate, and what a caterpillar looks like before and while it is forming its chrysalis. And while the book uses the word metamorphasis it doesn’t really talk about what happens between the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and the butterfly hatching.

This butterfly is a peacock butterfly, and once it hatches the book covers the parts of a butterfly and the life cycle. It also talks about nocturnal moths (though it says nocturnal butterflies are “usually called moths” when moths are actually a different species) and what butterflies do at night.

I’m maybe a little hard on this book because my daughter is a butterfly expert from way back, but it is still cute and good for the very basic basics of the butterfly life cycle.

Both books would be fun additions to your bookshelf for younger kids starting to learn about different animals or who have an interest in insects.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Have you read?

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