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Autumn is one of the most beautiful times of year. 

Here we share 50 play activities for you to get inspiration from. Some wonderful ideas for your left over pumpkins too - not just for Halloween!

You can also find weekly nature planning ideas and invitations to play in my Rewilding Nature Study Programme

1. Make conker tea - provide charity shop tea pots and utensils for children to make their own nature afternoon tea!

2. Try Apple Bobbing! A classic.

3. Decorate pine cones.

4. Pumpkin Wash station.

5. Play Pumpkin or apple skittles!

6. Spider Web sensory tray using masking tape to create a web. Add conkers and tweezers.

7. Pumpkin hammering.

8. Autumn painting.

9. Apple printing 

10. Pumpkin ring toss.

11. Weighing pumpkins.

12. Spider printing.

13. Skeleton bone dig.

14. Pumpkin Tea! Open the tops and let the children scoop out the seeds and flesh for their pumpkin tea or pumpkin soup creations.

15. Web painting.

16. Make your own nature paint brushes.

17. M...

Autumn Leaves and Conkers Please - Conker Activities from Gemma's Childminding, a Hygge Accredited setting.

'We love to incorporate natural, eco-friendly and recycled products into our play. Our activities are very much child-led these days rather than adult-initiated. I find that being around nature whether this is outdoors or bringing nature indoors really supports the children's learning and wellbeing.

I've noticed some real changes in the children since adapting to a more 'Hygge' based environment and embracing a slow pedagogy.

Some snapshots of how we have enjoyed incorporating conkers into our everyday play this season.'

Woodland Theme Autumn Display

We set up a small display of interest for the children to explore. Lots of natural resources including conkers, pinecones and leaves. We incorporated various lights and some magnifying boxes for them to identify the different textures and colours up close.

They especially loved feeding the conkers to the woodland animals.

Pl...

Autumn time has to be one of my favourite times of the year. Having Oliver now makes it even more exciting too as I take a moment to stand back and watch him experience everything.

We have loved getting outside each day and doing a daily walk. Talking about all the things we notice each day and notice any changes. Doing this is very much inspired by the practice of the Danes with the daily walk children in early education do. We stop at our favourite tree as well to document its changes as we move through the year. 

I also think it's important that we as adults take the time to just pause and appreciate the slow moments of joy in the day. We can't teach hygge and living well if we don't model it ourselves. I've built this into our daily walk and we will often find a little spot to just sit and watch what's going on. 

On our walk yesterday we took great enjoyment in collecting up some of the fallen leaves and twigs. We then brought these back and I popped them in some water in our tu...

Embracing Hygge at The Flower Cottage this Autumn season 🍁

Hygge in the Early Years member Caitlin, from The Flower Cottage Childminding has recently given her setting a wonderful autumn makeover. Giving us all the Autumn feels! We couldn't help but fall in love as it is so inspiring.

We asked Caitlin if she would share with us some of the hygge activities in her setting:

Noticing changes as we transition from Summer to Autumn, observing the colours transitioning, watching the leaves fall and finding hidden treasures outdoors that can be brought into our indoor play 🍂

Melting pumpkin spice wax melts in our burner on a morning and simply enjoying a lovely storybook as a group, cuddled in blankets and cosy jumpers.

Enjoying slow learning in our play spaces filled with twinkle lights, flickering candles and nooks of light from lamps, following the child’s lead but always being there on hand in time of need.

Enabling and encouraging children to reach their next hurdle and pr...

How do we slow down our planning and also plan our environment responsively?

This is something I share the exact steps to do in my slow planning guide availablehere. 

Below Abbie shares an example from her setting.

As the evenings have become darker, we have been sitting outside having our evening snack under the stars, our children have been fascinated by the moon! 

We created this provocation around the moon and space, our children came straight in to explore which we then extended on further.. Our children commented that it is dark in the night sky, so we added a thin blanket across this area to create a really cosy den with our fairy lights. Our indoor lighting is rarely used as our fairy lights and resources soften the atmosphere and really encourage awe and wonder for our children. 

I could really see this provocation enhancing children's learning and slowing down their play to become more present and really learn about their world. 

Our role as an adult is to show inte...

I get asked all the time...'Where do you get your resources from?'

Firstly, many of the resources we use in Early Years can be collected, reclaimed or re-used for free. Some of my favourite natural Autumn loose parts are;

• Leaves from different trees and different colours
• Dried leaves and flower petals
• Leaf skeletons
• Twigs of different lengths and thickness
• Acorns
• Pine cones
• Moss
• Bark
• Tree cookies
• Tree stumps
• Pumpkins and squash
• Conkers

I also like to add items like:

• Wooden buttons
• Grapat loose parts
• Cotton reels
• Coloured sheets of felt
• Empty picture frames
• Glass beads
• Numicon

Placemats, mirrors, lightboxes and tinkertrays are all good to include alongside too.

When it comes to buying resources i have always worked in schools and settings with very little money to spend on resourcing. Any money that we did have would be spent on;

1. High quality staffing

2. Block Play resources

3. Books

4. Small world imaginative play

I feel that when we spend ...