Autumn on the way ...

We'll be doing far more on autumn next month, but I decided to touch on it the other day, having found some fallen acorns whilst walking in Rugby. We don't have any oak trees near us, though we do have some vast horse-chestnut trees, so it seemed a good time to talk about different trees and their individual leaf shapes and seed types. We touched on human DNA too, talking about inherited characteristics like eye and hair colour, height, nose and ear shapes etc. (Particularly relevant to the boys as poor D. has inherited his father's over-sized ears!) My drawings of different leaf shapes on the white board are not exactly marvellous, but luckily, I don't think the kids noticed ...

We found some horse-chestnut leaves and conkers still in their shells, as well as lying fallen and shiny in the grass - such wonderful things, conkers! Discussions included branch size and why acorns are attached by such slender stems, while the heavier conkers need a thick stem.

Soon we'll be able to gather more leaves, as their colours change and they start to fall in earnest, so we can then do leaf-rubbings with wax crayons and maybe some associated 'sorting' games according to size, colour, shape, type of tree, etc.




But harvest time is here, certainly, even if the weather's still too warm some days to be entirely autumnal. We have a local church harvest festival this weekend, with an auction of fresh produce after the service. Meanwhile, at home, our own apples are begging to be picked, and although there are far more than we can possibly manage to eat alone, we went out the other day to gather a few bowlfuls from the three apple trees in our back garden.

We also discussed general harvesting techniques again, after covering it last week - we've actually been able to watch the farmers bringing in the various harvests from our back garden, as we're surrounded by farming land here - and then used the apples we'd picked in a counting activity later that day.

This is one of the older apple trees, bent and gnarled, but extremely fertile. Perfect fruit for pies and crumbles ...