Toddlers in Autumn

Autumn is a time associated with wonderful things like back to school, festive holidays, harvest and changes in weather and natural landscape. Naturally, the themes and icons that we are learning about in this autumn unit include changes in nature, leaves, hibernation, animal migration and preparation.

So how can toddlers authentically learn about and experience autumn?

- With whole bodies, all senses, lots of fun exploration and a bit of imagination.

We began our autumn unit by first discussing what we know about the summer. The information and experience was fresh in children's minds and they all had lots to share. The discussion naturally lead to noticing that it's not as hot anymore and we are now wearing different clothes than we did in the summer. That is because it's not summer anymore it's autumn time now. So what is autumn? What does it look like? How can we tell it's autumn? How can we learn more about autumn? We love books and they're great for learning about new things so we read a book about autumn and learned that signs of autumn are all around. We then decided to take a look outside our window to see if we can notice any changes in nature.

Through the window things still looked pretty much the same as they did in the summer. We needed to take a closer look and investigate the outdoors hands on. Before going on our nature walk we remembered from the book and talked about where to look when looking for signs of autumn. We also brought explorer bags outside with us so we could bring some evidence back to class for further investigation.

We looked high.............

We looked low...............

And here is what we found......

"Wow, look at all the leaves on the ground." "I think I see a bug." "Hello bug, are you there?"

"Look Morah, I found a pine cone like in the book." "I'm going to bring it to class."

"Look up there, I see some red and orange leaves." "The other leaves are still green, they're not red or orange, they didn't change colors yet."

"I found some leaves on the grass, I'm going to put them in my bag so I can bring them to class."

Later in class we took a closer look at all the leafy treasures we found on our nature walk. We touched the, we smelled them, we shared what we know and learned about them and finally we concluded that signs of autumn are most certainly all around.

Here we are exploring what we found.

"I found this leaf on the ground, this leaf is red and yellow."

"I got a lot of leaves and sticks, this leaf is green."

"I found some rocks outside."

"I'm looking at this tiny leaf, it's green with a little bit of yellow."

"You want to see...... Look........."

"Leaves are messy but that's OK because we all work together to clean up."