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Primary Teaching Autumn Activities

Written by Adam Still | Aug 23, 2024 1:15:58 PM

As the leaves turn golden and the air becomes crisp, autumn provides a wonderful backdrop for creative and engaging teaching activities in primary schools. This season offers a wealth of opportunities to connect learning with the changing environment, fostering curiosity and creativity among pupils. We've gathered a collection of fun and engaging autumn-themed activities that will bring the magic of the season into your classroom. 

Table of Contents:

  • Exploring Nature Through Walks
  • Autumn-Themed Literacy Activities
  • Science and Maths Autumn-Themed Activities
  • Autumn Art and Crafts
  • Celebrating Cultural Festivals

Incorporating autumn-themed activities into your lesson plans will create a rich and varied learning experience that captures the essence of the season. Whether through nature, art, reading or science, these activities will help your pupils engage with autumn in a meaningful and enjoyable way.

Exploring Nature Through Walks

Nature Scavenger Hunt

Take your pupils on an outdoor adventure with an autumn nature walk. Equip them with a scavenger hunt list featuring seasonal items like acorns, colourful leaves, pinecones and mushrooms. Encourage them to observe changes in the environment and collect samples to examine back in the classroom.

Leaf Identification

After collecting leaves during your nature walk, help students identify different tree species. Once identified, they can use the leaves for sorting or art projects, such as leaf rubbings or creating a leaf collage. This activity combines science with art, enhancing both observational and creative skills.

Autumn-Themed Literacy Activities

Autumn Poem Writing

Invite pupils to express their observations of the season through poetry. Start with a group discussion session about autumn sights, sounds, smells and feelings. Then, guide them to write acrostic poems, action poems, haikus or simple rhymes inspired by the season. Display their work on an autumn-themed display board to celebrate their creativity.

Autumn Stories

Choose books with autumn themes to read aloud during story time to spark discussions about the season and inspire creative storytelling. Follow up the reading with a creative writing task where pupils imagine their own autumn adventures.

Autumn Spellings

Why not fully embrace the theme and incorporate autumn-themed spellings and vocabulary into your lessons. Examples include acorn, apple, chilly, cobweb, corn, harvest, haystack, leaves, pumpkin, rake, scarecrow, spider.

Science and Maths Autumn-Themed Activities

Pumpkin Maths

Pumpkins are a great resource for hands-on maths activities. Bring a few into the classroom and use them for counting, measuring circumference, estimating weight and even simple arithmetic. Older pupils can engage in more complex tasks like creating graphs from the data they collect or calculating averages.

Seasonal Science

Autumn is perfect for conducting seasonal science experiments. One engaging activity is exploring why leaves change colour. Use simple experiments to demonstrate how chlorophyll breaks down, revealing other pigments. You could also experiment with the process of decomposition by observing how quickly different autumn items break down over time.

 

Autumn Art, Crafts and Music

Harvest and Halloween-Themed

Celebrate the season’s colours with harvest and halloween-themed crafts. Pupils can paint pinecones or print leaves with a variety of art materials. They could also create some tasty treats to eat to celebrate the season.

Autumn Lanterns

Create cosy classroom decor by making autumn lanterns. Pupils can glue pressed leaves onto jars and place a tea light inside, creating a warm, glowing effect. These lanterns make great projects that pupils can take home with them and can also be used to decorate the classroom during the darker autumn afternoons.

Autumn Songs

Incorporate autumn-themed music and songs into your daily routines or singing assemblies. These can be very catchy though, so you may find yourself singing them on your way home too!

Celebrating Cultural Festivals

Harvest Festival

Autumn is a season of harvest, and many cultures celebrate this with unique festivals. Use this time to teach pupils about different harvest celebrations around the world and incorporate activities like arts and crafts, cooking or storytelling to bring these traditions to life. 

Halloween and Bonfire Night Activities

Autumn also brings Halloween and Bonfire Night, which can be incorporated into the curriculum through themed activities. For Halloween, pupils can create spooky stories, carve pumpkins or learn about the history of the holiday. For Bonfire Night, discuss the historical significance of the event and create artwork depicting fireworks or bonfires.

     

How Does Pango Support Primary Teachers?

Save valuable time on lesson planning with Pango. Our extensive library of educational resources sourced from leading publishers, coupled with our powerful AI tools, transforms what used to take hours into mere minutes. Whether you need a themed autumnal lesson, or a scheme of work for a particular subject area, Pango is here to help! Start today with a 7-day free trial to explore all our premium resources, and let us support your through your teaching career.