We are well into the fall season, and you may have already enjoyed some fall activities with your family. There are so many iconic fall activities like picking apples, jumping into leaf piles, and looking at beautiful foliage. So while we are enjoying these fun fall activities with our kids, let’s look for ways to pull in some teaching opportunities as well. Let’s look for ways to teach our kids through our fall fun times.
Learn with Apples
Apples are a standard fall food, and fall is the best time of year to eat apples. While you fill baskets with apples at the orchard or enjoy apples at home, you can learn the colors that go along with apples. And while you learn to identify red, green, yellow, or even brown, you could help your child learn the signs for these colors too. Check out the colors section of our free Signing Time Dictionary for these colors and more!
Another way to learn as you pick or enjoy apples is to learn about fruit and how it grows on trees. There are often great board books and picture books at the library to help your child learn these concepts on a level that is good for them. Kids love these simple and fun books that help them understand something about science. This is a great way to teach our kids through our fall fun.
It’s also a great time to learn other signs that go along with apples, like tree or eat, or the obvious choice: APPLE.
And lastly, as you bake with your apples, let your kids count with you or learn about measuring as you work on your apple recipes. You can find instructions for signing numbers here.
Learn with Leaves
What a perfect way to teach our kids through our fall fun! We can talk to our kids about what leaves do for trees and why the leaves turn colors. Or again check out books from the library to help you out. There are lots of childrens’ books about trees losing their leaves in the fall.
You could also learn how to identify local trees by the shape of their leaves. Tree identification books can help you with this, along with lots of online resources. Kids love to look through the leaf shapes to find the one closest to what they are holding. And then they will always know what kind of tree that leaf belongs to.
And of course, you can learn the signs for leaf, trees, colors, and grow.
Learn about the Seasons
Of course, fall is the perfect time to learn about the seasons. It is so fun to show kids what makes the seasons change and how that makes our weather change. A simple, easy way to demonstrate this is to stick a soft ball on the end of a stick and shine a flashlight on it. The flashlight is the sun, and you can tilt the ball (the earth) toward the sun as you spin it and rotate it around the flashlight. As you get around to the other side of your earth’s orbit, it will tilt the opposite direction and show how the same section that had so much light before is now experiencing more darkness. It helps our kids to see how the tilt of the earth changes the seasons for us.
We have some shows about the seasons at My Signing Time.
From Seasons to Salmon: All About Cycles from our new series, SciShow Kids
My Favorite Season from our Classic Signing Time Collection
Extraordinary Earth from Rachel & the TreeSchoolers
You can watch these shows in your My Signing Time digital subscription. And if you don’t have a subscription, you can try one out for free with a 14-day trial – plenty of time to watch through some shows and decide if a subscription is right for your family.
Let us know how you will find a way to teach your kids through fall fun!