While running and jumping on playgrounds is enjoyable for kids during many months of the year, families can focus on special activities during the autumn. As the seasons change and the weather cools, nature provides abundant opportunities for exploring and learning. Hikes, scavenger hunts, and even yard work are examples of ways to enjoy autumn outdoors with kids. When you spend time outdoors in the fall with your kids, you will be making many happy memories.
Organize a family field trip in the autumn to enjoy the season. A trip to a pumpkin patch or an apple orchard could delight kids of all ages.
Engaging Outdoor Activities for Kids
Young children might enjoy an autumn-themed scavenger hunt to find objects such as an acorn, a colored leaf, and a milkweed pod.
Farm Unit Activities and Games
Celebrate the harvest and autumn with some farm games and activities. For instance, a turkey strut game follows the rules of musical chairs, with kids strutting around like turkeys while music plays. When the music stops, everyone needs to stand on turkey prints.
Indoor Physical Activities for Kids (PDF)
If the weather is too blustery outdoors, keep kids active indoors instead. Organize a scavenger hunt, build a fort, or dance to lively music.
Outdoor Halloween Decoration: Hanging Ghosts
Get ready for Halloween by making ghosts to hang in the front yard. You'll need some white fabric, shepherd's hooks, and a few other materials to make fun ghosts.
Playing outdoors is a vital activity for kids during every season of the year. In the autumn, look for opportunities to play tag, go on a hike, ride bikes, or play kickball.
Organize a mapping activity for kids. Help youngsters create a map of a neighborhood or other nearby area by getting outdoors and plotting landmarks to include on the map.
Day Trips and Nature Walks (PDF)
Visit the zoo in the autumn to talk about how different animals prepare for the winter. Some animals hibernate, while others remain active to survive during the winter.
Team-Building Activities (PDF)
Team-building activities can be performed indoors or outdoors, and these activities are effective for breaking the ice and helping a group of kids get acquainted.
Games and Activities (PDF)
Make a spider web by having everyone stand in a circle while one person holds a ball of string. As everyone shares a bit of personal trivia, they toss the ball of string from person to person to create an intricate web.
This Fall, Focus on Health and Wellness (PDF)
Get everyone involved in autumn yard cleanup by raking leaves and pulling weeds. Kids can be surprisingly effective workers to get fall work done.
Collect leaves outdoors and give kids a chance to examine them with magnifying glasses. After kids explore leaves thoroughly with the magnifying glasses, encourage them to draw them in minute detail.
Take a walk in the woods and talk about trees and the way forests change throughout the seasons. As trees lose their leaves in the autumn, the entire forest changes its appearance.
Organize fun games for a Halloween party, such as a doughnut race or an apple pass.
13 Ideas for Outdoor Halloween Activities: Spook Yourself Silly
A hike after dark can be a mysterious activity for kids. Wait for the sun to set and then visit a park with flashlights to take a night hike.
Great Family Halloween Activities Beyond Trick or Treating
Visit a corn maze with the family in the autumn to find your way through the rows of corn. Kids often enjoy this activity because it requires problem-solving and map-reading.
50 Fun Things to Do With Your Kids This Fall
Get kids busy outdoors in the fall. Planting bulbs in the autumn will result in beautiful flowers the next spring.
Signs of Fall (PDF)
Take a family walk to notice all of the things that are changing as summer gives way to fall. You could take pictures of signs of fall or write them down in a notebook.
Kids could spend the summer growing pumpkins. When the pumpkins are about the size of a softball, help them scratch their names or initials into the flesh of the pumpkins with a nail. As the pumpkins continue to grow, the letters will become a part of the pumpkins' flesh.
Music and Movement Ideas (PDF)
Combining music with physical movement gets kids exercising in enjoyable ways, both indoors and outdoors.
Clean up the yard by raking leaves. When you finish, have fun jumping in them.
Leaf-Matching (PDF)
This leaf-matching activity involves choosing several leaves from different trees, identifying them, and then trying to match the leaves that came from the same trees.
Outdoor Learning Pack (PDF)
Talk about animal homes outdoors, and then take a nature walk with a focus on finding animal homes such as bird nests, squirrel homes, and chipmunk holes.
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