As the days get shorter, it’s getting harder to spend after-school hours outside. But that doesn’t mean you have to hunker down for a long winter! Use the autumn season to bring nature inside the classroom and cultivate your students’ imagination and curiosity.
Being in nature has often been linked to feeling awe, which in turn, is linked to numerous cognitive benefits, such as being more generous, feeling more creative, lowering stress levels, and even boosting your immune system. What better traits to help your students develop? And the great thing about awe is that you don’t need to visit the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls to inspire it; researchers have found feelings of awe are common in everyday life.
We’ve gathered some ideas of how you can bring nature into the classroom this fall and inspire your students to look more carefully at the world around them.
1. Gather nature items like acorns, pinecones, pumpkin seeds, or mini pumpkins or squashes to bring to the classroom. Students can sort the items to practice counting, addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division. This hands-on activity helps students visualize mathematical operations, and the tactile aspect engages curious learners and provides an outlet for their energy.
2. Encourage the artistic side of your students while developing their problem-solving and pattern-recognition abilities. Give each of your students a mix of pumpkin and sunflower seeds, sturdy paper, and glue. Instruct them to create a pattern-based mosaic, whether it be stripes, chevrons, or circles. Then see where their imagination takes them!
3. Take advantage of the fall harvest to conduct some science experiments with apples or pumpkins. Develop a hypothesis, and then test which household acid or base best preserves apples. Or, introduce simple chemical reactions by creating a pumpkin volcano.
4. Bring a collection of leaves, both green and colorful, into the classroom. Then ask students to give their best explanations for why leaves change color in the fall. (You can find a simple explanation here.) You can also conduct a simple chromatography experiment to predict what color leaves will turn.
5. Introduce your students to dissection by having them investigate the inner workings of leaves, pumpkins, and squashes. Students can compare different types of leaves, as well as leaves in different states of changing color. If you’re willing to deal with a bit more mess, cut open a pumpkin or squash and have students identify the different parts of the vegetables.
Do you have other fall-themed activities you do with your class?
