Fall Science with Leaves and Pine Cones

Fall is a great time to gather natural materials to using in play, art and learning, and there are a great variety of things you can do with them, from painting on leaves to making collages of natural materials, drawing the parts of a leaf or a pine cone, and using those observations to learn more about the natural world.

Dayna from Lemon Lime Adventures has gathered some great ideas for exploring natural materials.

First, I love this experiment about why pinecones open. It’s honestly something I’d never thought about, but I think the observations her kids made and the experiment they came up with to learn more about how and why pinecones open and close were excellent. This is a great one to try if you have pine trees in your yard or where you walk in your neighborhood so you can gather a bunch to play with.

She also has a great list of sensory activities related to leaves including art projects, sensory jars, leaf playdough, a fall scavenger hunt and more.

Which reminded me of another leaf-related activity I saw recently involving leaves of different colors in water. I saw it a Kiwi Crate. Your kids will be surprised how easy it is to get the color out of leaves.

Do you have any activities involving leaves that you love to do? I’d love to hear about them!

Check out this article on the best STEM gifts for kids.

Check out our Online store for special buys on Educational gifts We find bulk items and end-of-stock supplies to bring you heavily discounted items. (make sure you check our store often so you don’t miss out on new stock). We also have some free printable files, including a Science PDF for learning about Microscopes.

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

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