Autumn Scavenger Hunt Activity + FREE Printable

The leaves have started to change colour and fall from their branches, autumn is well and truly here. Autumn is probably one of my favourite seasons, early autumn at least, we still have some sunshine and fine days, the leaves are crisp and the air is fresh and full of the mellowness of the season. I love it, and I know I’m not the only one. Yesterday we met a couple of his friends for an autumn scavenger hunt in a local park, it was just the thing to keep them engaged and occupied for an hour and they all did really well.

We live by the river and walk the dog down there most days. By the river is a nature reserve and we often see lots of different birds, insects and plants. I’ve tried to keep the autumn scavenger hunt quite simple, so you should be able to find most of the bugs, birds and plants in your local park.

Download your free Autumn Scavenger Hunt Printable Here!

I have left room on the printable for children to make notes too. If they spot anything different or noteworthy, they can write all about what they’ve seen in the notes section.

Going on a scavenger hunt, or a nature trail is a wonderful thing to do with children and to help them learn a little more about nature and the world around them.

Whatever you do this season, whether you’re walking in the park; pond dipping in a nature reserve or walking the dog on the beach; make sure you stay safe. Keep your eyes peeled for all the wonders of nature and watch where you put your feet!

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The Ultimate Autumn Bucket List

Autumn is my favourite season. It’s all about cosy jumpers, roaring fires, long walks kicking through the fallen leaves and everything pumpkin. It’s a season packed with fun things; from Halloween to Bonfire night and conker season to pumpkin picking. There’s a lot going on, so I’ve created this awesome Autumn bucket list of things to do this season so we don’t miss a thing.

The Ultimate Autumn Bucket List

My Ultimate Autumn Bucket List

Go apple picking

Bake an apple pie with your family

Go bat watching at dusk

Make clay tree faces

Collect some conkers – apparently putting conkers in your house keeps spiders away, I’m not entirely convinced this works.

Have a game of conkers

Dress up for Halloween

Gather seeds to plant next spring

Go for an autumn walk and kick through the leaves

Go stargazing in your garden, wrap yourselves up in blankets and drink hot chocolate whilst gazing at the stars.

Decorate the house for Halloween

Put together a hot chocolate station, marshmallows, squirty cream, your favourite chocolate toppings and sprinkles, go for it!

Make some Halloween chocolate bark

Do some leaf crafts with the family

Autumn Leaf Crafts: Simple Autumn Leaf Faces

Have a go at leaf printing or leaf rubbing

Make a bug hotel in the garden and give your garden critters somewhere cosy to spend the winter

Collect some leaves and make autumn leaf crowns

Make hot apple juice

Bake a pumpkin pie with your family

Visit a pumpkin patch and pick some pumpkins

Carve some spooky pumpkins

Go out for pumpkin spice lattes

Toast marshmallows or make smores

Play with torches to create spooky shadows

Go for a torchlight walk

Make a batch of treacle toffee

Visit a farm and watch a combine harvester at work

Watch Hocus Pocus on Halloween

What are you up to this autumn? We’ve got lots of plans for pumpkin picking, leaf crafts, long walks and so much hot chocolate. The bat watching season is in full swing and we even spotted some in our garden last night. What’s on your autumn bucket list?

The Ultimate Autumn Bucket List

Bonfire Night Recipe: Treacle Toffee Pan Pops

Treacle toffee has long been a favourite of fine. Sticky and sweet, it’s something of a love/hate treat. I’ve always enjoyed it, but not really enjoyed eating the sharp shards of broken toffee. It can be sticky to eat, if only there was some way of eating it without getting sticky fingers. To solve the sticky finger problem, I’ve come up with these Treacle Toffee Pan Pops – all the loveliness of treacle toffee, but neatly presented on a lolly stick. I can confirm they are absolutely delicious too!

Bonfire Night Recipe: Treacle Toffee Pan Pops

To me, Bonfire Night has always been a celebration of cosy autumnal food and flavours. We always have jacket potatoes heaped with hot toppings like chilli. There’s always hot dogs with onions, toffee apples, parkin with custard and treacle toffee. From now on I’m adding my Treacle Toffee Pan Pops to the list!

These treacle treats are set in shallow tin foil cases, the kind you might buy jam tarts in. After a bit of searching I found exactly what I wanted here on Amazon (this is an affiliate link. I might get a couple of pence if you buy them). You will also need some lolly sticks (or popsicle sticks if you’re in America), again you can find them here on Amazon (affiliate link).

I made 10 Treacle Toffee Pan Pops and poured the rest of my treacle toffee into a lined swiss roll tin so I could compare and contrast the two with my family, we all preferred eating the pan pops, they were just easier to manage. This recipe would make around 30 pan pops, give or take. It’s also helpful if you have a cooking thermometer, sugar can be a tricky beast and this will help you know when it’s cooked properly. Here’s one of those Amazon affiliate links to one.

Bonfire Night Recipe: Treacle Toffee Pan Pops

Treacle Toffee Pan Pops

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon of white wine vinegar
2 tablespoons of water
125g of unsalted butter
450g of soft brown sugar
225g of treacle

Method:

Put your vinegar, water and butter in a large saucepan and melt together, make sure you stir with a wooden spoon. When your butter has melted add your sugar and treacle.

Gently heat the mixture, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon so nothing sticks to the sides or the bottom of the pan. Be careful not to splash anything out of the pan, it will burn. You need to boil the mixture to 138°C. It will take about 20 minutes to get to this point, don’t rush it.

When it’s boiled, remove it from the heat and let it sit until it stops bubbling.

Bonfire Night Recipe: Treacle Toffee Pan Pops

I set my foil tins in a cupcake tray because I felt they’d be steadier there. If you have enough trays, do that. Carefully (please do this very carefully) pour about 2 tablespoons of the treacle toffee mixture into each pan, it should be so that it’s near the top, but not pouring over. The liquid toffee is very hot at this point.

Once you’ve filled all of your tin foil pans, take your wooden lolly sticks and place them in each one. Leave them for about ten minutes and then go and turn the sticks over in the toffee, this will help the stick to sink into it better. Leave the pops to cool for as long as you can, at least two hours.

When they’re fully cool, wrap each one in cellophane, I used cellophane bags I’d bought to put treats in. Keep them in an airtight tin until Bonfire Night.

Bonfire Night Recipe: Treacle Toffee Pan Pops

If you want to make a tray of treacle toffee, use the same method but pour the mixture into a greased Swiss roll tin. When the mixture is cooling, mark out squares with a sharp knife and go over those marks every half an hour or so until it’s fully cool. With luck your toffee will snap into neat little squares. Bag those up in cellophane and suck them around the bonfire!

If you enjoyed this recipe, you might also like to try this honey spiced pumpkin pie.

Bonfire Night Recipe: Treacle Toffee Pan Pops

Autumn Leaf Crafts: Simple Autumn Leaf Faces

As much as I absolutely loved the summer this year, I’m pleased as punch that it’s autumn and we’re in that lovely crisp, crunchy leaves part of autumn, before everything goes soggy, slippy and a bit miserable. One thing we love doing is collecting the colourful fallen leaves and making things with them. For a bit of fun we made some autumn leaf faces with our leaves and gave them a bit of character. These simple leaf faces are really easy to make and with a bit of imagination you can really bring your leaf characters to life!

Autumn Leaf Crafts: Simple Autumn Leaf Faces

They’re so simple to do, just go on a little nature walk and collect some lovely leaves. If they’re freshly dropped and not dry and crisp I think they work better, but try to collect a variety of different leaves and colours.

Simple Autumn Leaf Faces

You will need:
A collection of leaves
Some googly eyes
PVA glue, I used Bostik White Glu
A black sharpie

Autumn Leaf Crafts: Simple Autumn Leaf Faces

How to make your Autumn Leaf Faces:
Take your leaf and dust it down so you rub any dirt off. Take your googly eyes and glue them on wherever you think they should go on the leaf. Just use a dab of glue on the back of each eye.

Think about what kind of character your leaf may be and think about how close together their eyes should be, should they be the same size eyes? Is your leaf a cyclops (one eye) or an alien (three or more eyes)?

Autumn Leaf Crafts: Simple Autumn Leaf Faces

Using the black felt tip or sharpie, draw on a mouth and maybe some eyebrows. Again think about the character and what kind of features it might have.

Leave your leaf faces to one side for a little while to allow the glue to dry. If you really like your leaves, you could stick them to lolly sticks and make them into little leafy puppets.

Our leaf faces are full of character, they make me smile a lot. I think I will sew them onto some embroidery thread and make some leafy bunting out of them.

If you enjoyed this autumn leaf craft, you might also like to try these:

Autumn Leaf Crafts: Simple Autumn Leaf Faces

Craft Round Up: Five Easy Autumn Leaf Crafts

At this time of year the trees are shedding their beautiful leaves. The pavements and paths are filled with crispy and colourful leaves and they are crying out to be used in crafts. Easy autumn leaf crafts are amongst my favourite kinds of craft, partly because it’s good fun to actually collect the leaves, then sitting down with the boys and having fun crafting something beautiful makes me happy. Here are some of my five favourite ideas for easy autumn leaf crafts.

Autumn Leaf Sand Art

Easy Autumn Leaf Crafts

We are firm fans of sand art and we loved doing this fab kit from Baker Ross. My top tip for sand art is to do it on a tray or a piece of paper so you can collect any stray sand to use again later. Sand art kits are fab, just peel the stickers off the leaf and sprinkle sand onto the sticky paper underneath. It requires some concentration and a steady hand, but my five year old loved it and I think he made some very beautiful autumn leaves.

Make your own Autumn Wreath

This is a great rainy day activity. Using some foam stickers from Baker Ross and a paper plate we made our own autumn wreath which I think looks pretty cool, and he enjoyed making it which is the most important thing.

Making Autumnal Alphabet Wreaths

This is a craft I did myself (a grown up craft if you will), but you could easily do this with children too. I think this looks fab and it was really good fun to do too, it’s probably one of my favourite easy autumn leaf crafts. You can read my tutorial here.

Create an autumnal woodland wonderland

easy autumn leaf crafts

This is one of those easy autumn leaf crafts which is good to have up your sleeve for a rainy day. It was incredibly easy, but he had the best time making his woodland wonderland, who doesn’t love stickers? These woodland foam stickers from Baker Ross are great. We used them with some of the leftover leaf stickers from our autumn wreath and made our lovely woodland scenes. All I had to do was print out a silhouette of a tree and he did the rest.

Paint your own tree

I’m very fond of this one. We had so much fun going to the park and collecting a big bag of leaves. When we got home we had a hot chocolate and warmed up. We painted a big tree and then stuck leaves on it. This wonderful artwork is still hung up in our kitchen and it makes me smile at the memory every time I see it.

These are my ideas for easy autumn leaf crafts – what do you like to make at this time of year?

Five Easy Autumn Leaf Crafts

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Crafts: Autumnal Alphabet Wreaths

This week it has been dry, crisp and decidedly autumnal. During a walk around my local park I filled a bag with fallen leaves to do autumn leaf crafts with the boy, but as I’d gathered so many I wanted to make something by myself, for myself. So whilst the boys were out feeding the ducks, I spent a happy hour at the kitchen table making autumnal alphabet wreaths.

autumnal alphabet wreaths

These autumnal alphabet wreaths are really easy to make. I’m really pleased with how mine turned out. You can make whichever letter, or letters you want. I chose an A because our surname begins with an A. You could also do any shape you wanted. I’ve got plans to do a few more, maybe a heart and a circle.

You will need:

A piece of thick cardboard
A pencil
Scissors
PVA glue
A paintbrush
Lots of leaves, a variety of shapes and sizes is best
A piece of ribbon

To make your autumnal alphabet wreaths:

With your pencil, sketch the letter or shape you will base your wreath on. You can make this as big or small as you would like, mine was around 30cm tall. Carefully cut out your shape, taking care not to lose any fingers. If a child is making this, ideally an adult should do this part.

Before you begin sticking your leaves to your wreath shape, it’s easier to fix on your ribbon. As I knew my shape would be covered in leaves I chose to staple my ribbon to the wreath, but you could tie the ribbon to the top, or make a small hole and thread it through if you prefer.

autumnal alphabet wreaths

Once you are happy with the cardboard base of your wreath, pour some PVA glue into a bowl and in sections paste glue onto the cardboard. As you start to stick the leaves on, dab a little extra glue on each leaf and stick the leaf to the shape. Try and choose an interesting mixture of leaves and cover any gaps.

I found it useful to stop every so often and leave the glue to set a little before starting the next section. You may also find it helpful to lay a plastic tray or board on top of the leaves for half an hour or so, this will apply even pressure whilst the glue dries a bit and it shouldn’t crush the leaves too much.

autumnal alphabet wreaths

Once you’ve covered your alphabet wreaths, leave them somewhere to dry, preferably overnight. Once dry you can hang them up indoors. I’m really pleased with how mine turned out. It was really effective and would lend itself to lots of different and rather interesting shapes.

Autumn leaf crafts are some of my favorite things to so, I think the colours and textures are so lovely, it’s a shame not to make the most of them whilst they’re so vibrant.

autumnal alphabet wreaths

Autumn Crafts – Make your own Autumn wreath

We went for a little walk yesterday around the park and we looked at all the different colours of the leaves. It was a mellow, autumnal day, still warm but with a slight seasonal dampness. The slow death of summer and the beginnings of decay were all around us. It was a good chance to talk about change and the seasons. Inspired by this we came home and made an autumn wreath. It was really simple and lots of fun to do. Why don’t you have a go too?

autumn wreath

You will need:
One paper plate
Orange paint (plus paintbrush etc)
Leaf foam stickers
A short piece of ribbon or string
Sticky tape
Scissors

A few days before our walk we painted our paper plates orange, we had to give them a couple of coats of paint and we left them to dry. Once they were dry I cut out the inside of the plate, leaving a ring which we could decorate.

We sat down with our packet of leaf foam stickers from Baker Ross (currently available at a bit of a bargain price), and got sticking. The pack contains six assorted leaf designs in autumnal shades. Which gave us another chance to talk about leaves, autumn and the seasons.

Once we’d decorated our autumn wreath to our satisfaction, I cut a loop of ribbon and stuck it to the back of the paper plate ring with sticky tape, and we proudly hung our autumn wreath up on the wall.

It’s a really, really simple craft activity, but I think the result is quite effective and it’s a lovely way to brighten up the house a bit now the nights are beginning to get shorter. Roll on Christmas! (Too soon?)

Autumn Crafts – Painting Hedgehog Tealight Holders

It may be September, but the world has suddenly slipped into autumn. Autumn is one of my favourite seasons, full of mellow fruitfulness, crunchy leaves and an excuse to get our open fire lit and roaring. The small boy and I have been noticing the changes around us on our walks, the berries in the hedgerows, the acorns and conkers starting to fall from the trees and the busy squirrels stocking up for the lean winter months. This lead us to start talking about hibernation and the snuffling, shuffling hedgehogs which we rarely see by often read about.

We were sent a box of ceramic hedgehog tealight holders to paint from craft company Baker Ross, so one afternoon after our autumnal walk we sat down and painted them up.

Hedgehog Tealight Holders

The box contained four plain white ceramic hedgehog tealight holders and we used some paint which we were sent to decorate them. A box of four ceramic hedgehog tealight holders currently costs just £4.40, which I think is good value and you can paint them up as presents for people.

Hedgehog Tealight Holders

I chose to paint mine blue with multi-coloured spots and the small boy wanted to paint his black and red. As you can see from the picture he was really focused on the task and he sat and painted his hedgehog for about half an hour or so. This is a great craft activity which works to strengthen his hand muscles, improve his hand-eye co-ordination and his attention to detail.

Hedgehog Tealight Holders

While we were painting we chatted away about hedgehogs and I looked up a few hedgehog facts for him. Did you know….?

A baby hedgehog is called a hoglet
Each hedgehog has about 5000 spiky spines, each one falls out after about a year
Hedgehogs hibernate in the winter, they eat as much as they can and then find a cosy nest to curl up in for the winter around October
A hedgehog is nocturnal and only comes out at night to forage for food
A hedgehogs favourite food is slugs – yukky!

Hedgehog Tealight Holders

Here are our finished hedgehog tealight holders. We’re very proud of them. They were easy to paint and I think they look really good. Despite my initial thought that the black and red hedgehog might look a bit gothic, I think he’s managed to create quite an interesting effect. He’s incredibly proud of his creation and loved to show it off to visitors and enjoys me lighting it at night.

Autumn’s Best Bits

I love autumn, I mean what’s not to love? Crunchy leaves to kick through, warm fires to cozy up in front of, the autumnal festivals of Halloween and Bonfire night. I love it. It helps of course that my birthday falls at the start of autumn, and the small boy’s falls towards the end, so autumn is quite literally party season for us. I’ve picked some of my favourite pictures taken of us and our adventures during autumn, what were our best bits?

I love this one, my son and his cousin at Bramhall Hall during half term, wrapped up against the chill and having an awful lot of fun.

I love the skies in autumn, clear and blue, with fluffy clouds and sunsets where the sky is a thousand shades of orange, pink and red.

I love this picture of my son blowing out his birthday cake. His birthday party was a very cold day and him and 16 of his friends enjoyed a trip to the miniature railway, braved the cold and were rewarded with lots of cake. It was a lovely day.

This was our “pumpkin patch” from Halloween, I love the colours of pumpkin and squash, they’re so cheery.

This is another one of the boy and his cousin. They were doing some autumn leaf craft with some leaves we’d collected from the park, it’s a reminder of a lovely day and it was a nice, interesting thing to do with the boys.

Another of my favourite autumn pictures is this memorial bench in our local park, it’s dedicated to a local lacrosse player and is a stunning piece of wood carving. I love the way the small boy is peeking over the bench, it gives it an idea of the scale of the carving too.

Possibly my favourite picture is this one taken during early autumn, it was still warm enough for shorts and a t-shirt but the leaves were beginning to turn and the evenings had a definite autumnal chill about them. The boy looked and was so happy that day.

I love each of these pictures for different reasons. If I were to pick one which I felt represented autumn it would be the boys making the leafy tree. We had such a good time collecting the leaves, then making the tree, it’s a real autumnal memory for us all.

Autumn Leaf Crafts and Activities

I hold my hands up, I’m not by any stretch of the imagination particularly good at crafting with my son. I’ll give it a go because it’s important for him to know that you don’t have to be any good at something to enjoy it. Having fun is the most important lesson, so this week we turned our hands to some autumn leaf crafts and had lots of fun.

One dry afternoon we went to our local park for a picnic, afterwards we had a little walk and collected a bag of leaves, pine cones, pine needles, bark, sycamore seeds and anything else we could find. This was itself a fun and learning activity, we talked about why leaves turn brown, the different colours and shapes, how leaves feel, what seeds and pine cones are and what happens to seeds when you plant them.

Autumn Leaf Crafts

We loved our trip to the park and it was the perfect excuse to warm up with a mug of hot chocolate when we got home. We left the leaves to dry for a bit and then got to work.

1. Put a nice veiny leaf under a piece of paper and rub over it with a crayon, this will give a relief of the leaf. Try it with different kinds of leaves.

2. We did some nice sticking and gluing. We glued some leaves to some paper and drew pictures around them. He liked this because he liked painting the glue on the leaves and being quite precise with it. This was great for his fine motor skills.

3. We held a leaf on a piece of paper and dabbed round it with some paint on a sponge. This is quite a pretty effect and it helped him think about the shape of the leaf and its outline.

4. The small boy had his cousin round to play, we decided to make a big tree. We taped a long roll of paper to the side of the kitchen cupboard (which meant it was easy to wipe drips where they’d missed the paper), we painted a large tree and some grass and we stuck a variety of leaves to the branches of the tree and also in the grass. This was a lovely activity, the boys got involved in some team work and alternated jobs.

easy autumn leaf crafts

We’ve had some messy-ish fun and we learnt a lot about autumn. We’ve had a great few days playing with and crafting with the bag of leaves we picked up from the park. It’s been pretty cheap entertainment too, for the small cost of some paper, paint and glue we’ve done a small stack of autumnal activities.