A couple of the kids and I took a lovely little walk this weekend, and shortly thereafter, these Educational Activities with Fall Leaves took place. It was amazing how many kinds of leaves we found on a toddler walk around the block. The colors, sizes, and designs were beautiful and amazing.

At first, as we were walking down the street, my preschooler’s goal was to walk through the thickest piles of leaves, kick up and disrupting them as much as possible from their perfectly comfy spot in the gutter. It was fun to watch his focus change though as I started pointing out how cool the leaves were. Instead of sending them high sky, he started bending down to examine them, looking for new colors and shapes that weren’t in our rapidly growing collection.

Once we got home with the collection, the older girls became invested in the project as well. They immediately went out in search of their own collections so they could create some fall leaf art.

Educational Activities with Fall Leaves

The first educational activity we did was sorting by leaf size. We had leaves as small as 1 inch up to leaves that were 8 inches long. It was fun to compare them against each other to find which was biggest and smallest. The comparison was tricky in some cases because the shapes were so different, but the kids enjoyed the challenge. This is a great math activity for preschool and kindergarten ages to supplement and encourage what they are learning in school.

We also sorted the leafs by color. My preschooler was doing the sorting so we stuck to basic color families like red, yellow, brown and green. Older kids could take this to an entirely different level. They could sort each color family for strength and variation of color going all the way from green to yellow, to orange, to red, and finally brown.

The older girls used the fall leaves as shapes to create art. It was so fun to watch them see a leaf and picture it as an animal or other piece of art. My 10-year-old created a bat. My 7-year-old found a long red leaf spotted with brown. She instantly saw a ladybug and went to work. She used a variety of red leaves to create the sunset background to the green leaf her ladybug was resting on. They were so beautiful, I wanted to frame them.

My favorite thing about these educational activities with fall leaves is that they connected my kids with nature. They looked at leaves in a way they haven’t before, and enjoyed them, learned through them, and had a lot of fun. I hope where ever you are, you get a chance to get out and play in the leaves, and maybe learn something while you’re at it.

Happy Fall!