4 Fall Activities To Boost Children's Reading Readiness

September 23, 2019

Happy little baby girl child laughing in fall

Crisp air, apple picking, and pumpkin lattes! The changing season inspires a host of fall games for kids and seasonal fun to try out. We rounded up some great ideas for learning-based, fall activities for toddlers and early readers. These activities can help enhance reading readiness and engage children at the same time.

1. Pumpkin Spiced Cookie Letter Bake:

Mix together fun, food, and learning with this tasty activity. Whip up a delicious pumpkin spiced cookie dough (try this recipe) and cut out shapes in the form of letters (you can get cookie cutters at most baking goods stores). Cut out different letter shapes and place them all in front of your kids. Name a certain letter out loud, and ask your little learners to identify it. For every letter they identify, reward them with a cookie treat!

Note: Make sure there are doubles of each letter, just in case. For slightly older kids, you can even ask them to spell words out of the letters.

Phonetic Alphabet shaped cookie cutters on scattered flour.

2. CVC Word Jars:

Using Square Panda Smart Letters, make fall-themed CVC word jars! Write several different CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words on the lid (like CAT, NUT, etc.) and then toss the Smart Letters around in the jar. Ask your kids to find the right Smart Letters in the jar to correctly spell out each of the CVC words. This can also double as a sight word identification activity.

Square Panda Smart Letters for kids

3. Leafy Rhymes:

Draw or paint a tree trunk on a piece of paper and grab some construction paper to cut out some leaf shapes. Kids can paint these or color them in fun fall shades. Write down a word on one of the leaves and a corresponding rhyming word on another leaf, like CAT and BAT. Make as many rhyming pairs as you like! Place them all in front of your kids, and ask them to match the rhyming word pairs. They can glue or tape the leaf pairs to the tree trunk and create a beautiful fall word tree!

Fall crafts for kids with pencils paint ruler scissors.

4. Jack-O’-Lantern Pumpkin Word Search:

Grab several small pumpkins at the store and some markers. Kids can help draw jack-o’-lantern faces on each tiny pumpkin and you can label each pumpkin with a different rime word family (words that have common endings like:-at, -in, -og). Hide the pumpkins around the house or backyard. Identify a word family (“Find all the pumpkins with words that end in -at!”) and have your kids go seek the right ones!

jack o lantern pumpkin word search for kids

Forward the fall learning fun to someone you know who loves to learn with their little ones!

Comment below with your favorite reading activities for kids and share this blog post on social media or by email!

4 Fall Activities To Boost Children's Reading Readiness

1. Pumpkin Spiced Cookie Letter Bake:

2. CVC Word Jars:

3. Leafy Rhymes:

4. Jack-O’-Lantern Pumpkin Word Search:

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