Learning about Mushrooms for Kids

I guess mushrooms aren’t strictly a fall thing (the prized wild mushrooms where I live come out in the spring) but I think of them as a fall motif so let’s learn about mushrooms today.

Mushrooms are fungi, and there are more than 10,000 known species, ranging from delicious to deadly and coming in a multitude of shapes, sizes and colors. About 30 species glow in the dark. And they all start from a tiny spore!

Superstar Worksheets has worksheets and coloring pages on the life cycle of a mushroom and mushroom parts. Learn more about the parts of a mushroom and get some pretty diagrams to label from Wild Earth Lab.

Montessori Nature has a free printable chart comparing edible and poisonous mushrooms. The accompanying blog post talks about the different kinds of mushrooms shown on the chart and also includes a mushroom craft and a recipe for mushrooms. They also have paid content related to mushrooms.

This one also isn’t free but the unit study from For the Love of Homeschooling is gorgeous, with all sorts of beautiful illustrations of mushrooms and fungi. You’ll learn about taxonomy, anatomy, life cycle, symbiotic relationships, foraging, medicinal uses for fungi and lots more.

Grab mushroom activity sheets including a word search, labeling the parts of a mushroom and different kinds of mushrooms, from the Cascade Mycological Society. Nature Inspired Learning also has some great realistic mushroom coloring pages. Find a cute word search and coloring page, as well as mushroom craft ideas, at Me and My Inklings.

If you teach Spanish or just want to add a little Spanish to your learning about mushrooms, Niños and Nature has some great Spanish language mushroom content.

Of course you can bring real mushrooms into your lessons about mushrooms. You can observe different varieties (or even cook with them), paint with them (or make stamps like Mother Natured did) or take prints of the spores, as in this project from Gift of Curiosity. Spore prints are also part of this mushroom dissection activity from Wild Earth Lab.

If you live somewhere with mushrooms and fungi, you can go on a nature walk and see what you find. Make sure you grab a mushroom field guide, which is fun to look at even if you can’t see mushrooms in the wild in person.

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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