Teaching Science in Elementary School is crucial for nurturing young minds. But as educators, finding the time and resources to create engaging lessons can be a challenge. That's where this podcast comes in.

Welcome to Naturally Teaching Elementary Science, the show dedicated to supporting elementary teachers in their quest to bring authentic and place-based science experiences to their classroom. I'm Victoria Zablocki, a certified elementary teacher turned outdoor educator. With over a decade of experience coaching teachers on effective science teaching methods, I'm passionate about making science accessible, understandable, and fun for educators and students alike.

Join me as we explore strategies for teaching science in elementary school with practical teaching tips, insightful interviews, picture book reviews, and more. Whether you've taught for a long time or just started your teaching journey, this podcast is your trusty resource for enhancing your science curriculum. So let's grow together.

[1:02]

All right, everybody, welcome back to the Naturally Teaching Elementary Science podcast. My name is Victoria Zablocki and I'm your host. And today we're going to be talking more about fall because it is coming.

But this time, I'm super excited to bring you a bunch of fun fall activities that are aligned with K-5 Next Generation Science Standards to be able to help you teach concepts that are really rich in the fall season. Fall is a season of potential magic and mystery, especially to elementary students. Between the holidays and the changing of the colors and all the leaves falling, it's just magical.

So let's take advantage of this wonderful season to get your students engaged with your curriculum. But how can we do this? What I suggest is to gamify your curriculum.

Students learn through play, which is a concept that has been backed by studies, and also one that I hope to explore soon on this podcast. But anecdotally, this is one method of teaching that I saw some of the best results with the students that I worked with. Between role playing games, obstacle courses, relay races, and more, I saw that wonderful "aha" face many times as students experienced natural phenomenon through play.

So in this episode, I'm going to describe fun fall activities for grades K-5, and for each activity, I'll share the Next Generation Science Standard that inspired the activity, as well as the fall seasonal phenomenon that the activity helps explain. And make sure that you listen all the way through the end of the episode, because even though I've paired these activities to particular standards, you may find yourself inspired to use a similar concept for your curriculum, or even use the same activity for a different grade level. Also, if you're new to taking your students outside for learning, (most of these activities should be taken outside), check out Episode 6: Five Outdoor Education Safety Tips for Teaching Outside, for suggestions to make teaching outside easier. Now let's jump into it.

[3:05]

So for kindergarten, the Next Generation Science Standard that I pulled was K-ESS2-1: Use and share observations of local weather conditions to describe patterns over time.

And so the fall seasonal sign connected to this would be that fall comes with cooler temperatures, fewer hours of daylight, and often more precipitation than summer. So the activity that I chose for this is a game that I created to help understand seasons and why we have seasons, and I call it Season Tag. So gamifying the reason for the seasons by playing Season Tag can actually help your students understand this abstract concept.

It's hard for some adults to understand why we have the seasons, and to expect a kindergartner to understand it would be quite challenging. So what I'm suggesting is to find a larger open space, like an outside field or a gymnasium, and explain to your students that they're going to be playing three rounds of tags with different instructions for each round.

So for the first round, have two people start as it, and everyone playing will jog. And how you're going to play this tag game is if someone is tagged by the it person, they also become it. So you're going to play each round until everyone has been tagged. So for this first round, when they're jogging, it's going to represent fall or autumn because that's what we're talking about, which is a time with neither direct or indirect rays from the sun, and it has mild temperatures.

So your two it students represent the sun light, which is neither direct or indirect. And your students are going to be working kind of hard, but not super hard by jogging to be able to stay away from the it students. So they should feel physically a little warm, but not super hot.

So as your students are playing, your job as the teacher is to time how long each round takes with a stopwatch or with an app on your phone. So for round one, they'll jog and the two it people are going to go through and tag, and everyone will continue tagging until everyone has been tagged.

For the second round, there's going to be one person that's it, and everyone playing is going to walk. And like before, the it person will tag someone, and they'll also become it. But everyone is walking. So this round will definitely take you longer than the previous round. So I would suggest having a limit time, so five minutes or fewer, to be able to play this round and see if everyone ends up being tagged at that point.

So this round represents winter, a time with indirect sunlight and a lack of heat. So your single it student represents the indirect sunlight hitting the earth during the winter season, and your students are not working very hard at all, and they probably won't feel warm because they're just walking around. So make sure to talk to your students about how they felt this round went compared to fall.

And then your third round is going to represent summer. So it's going to get real active, real quick. Three people will start as it this time, and everyone playing can run. And again, when an it person tags someone, they also become it. So play continues until everyone has been tagged, and this round will likely happen quicker because everyone is on the move.

And as I said, this round represents summer, which is a time of a lot of direct sunlight and heat, which is why you have three it people starting and they're also running. So your three it students represent the direct sunlight hitting the earth during the summer season, and your students were running to stay away from the three it students, so they should feel really hot. So again, make sure to time this round and the previous round, and then ask your students which one they think was the longest, the shortest, and why.

And this game should help your students physically feel the difference between the seasons in an active and fun way. So by having the number of it students represent how much direct or indirect sunlight the earth experiences, your students can feel the energy of the game change based on the pressure of having more or fewer taggers. And in the summer, there's a lot of energy to go around, and plants and animals and humans are all active and taking advantage of it.

Whereas in the winter, there's less energy, and things move slower with fewer active organisms. If you wanted to, you could play a fourth round in between winter and summer, and it could be spring, and you would follow the same rules as you did for the fall season. But if you don't have a lot of time, you can just do those three.

[7:26]

For first grade, the Next Generation Science Standard that I pulled was 1-ESS1-1: Use observations of the sun, moon, and stars to describe patterns that can be predicted. So for this, the fall seasonal sign is that during fall, the hours of daylight are fewer and fewer until they're nearly equal on the autumnal equinox, and then they continue to dwindle until the winter solstice.

So a fun activity for your students would be to play day and night hopscotch. So to prep for this experience, you're going to make six hopscotch sets with chalk on one of your school sidewalks, and each set should include 12 squares in whichever configuration you'd like. So what I want you to do is label each hopscotch set with the month that they represent, starting with June and going through December. Each set will represent the average number of hours of daylight each day for the month that the set represents.

So for June, as an example, you would draw a sun in eight of the squares, and a moon in four squares. Because in June, the northern half of the U.S. typically experiences about 16 hours of daylight and eight hours of nighttime. So I'm using the northern half of the U.S. but you could always adjust it for wherever you're located. But the northern U.S. actually has a very nice and balanced number of hours, which makes this hopscotch game easier to set up. It also isn't going to be exact no matter how you play it.

And so this gives your students the general picture of how the hours change over the seasons. So moving on from June, you would have July and August, you would draw seven suns and five moons. For September, you would draw six suns and six moons, because that's when we experience the autumnal equinox, where the days are almost equal.

For October and November, you would draw five suns and seven moons, because now we're experiencing more night than day. And for December, you would draw four suns and eight moons, because that's when we're experiencing the most amount of night and the fewest hours of daylight. When you're drawing the suns and moons, make sure you alternate the suns and the moons, because what your students are going to do is they're going to hop on the suns only.

So it'll be important that you want to mix it up, so that way there's some suns, some moons, and you're not doing all seven suns in a row and then all five moons afterwards. You want to mix it up so they have to hop, and then sometimes they have to skip. So again, to be able to play, they're going to hop only on the suns, and they'll find that the summer months are easier because there's more sun.

And as they get into the fall months, it'll become more challenging as the sunlight starts to dwindle. And this is a fun way for your early childhood students to be able to experience the change in hours of daylight all at one time. Because it's such a gradual experience, seeing it in nature doesn't really give you the full picture. But if you have this sort of breakdown in front of them and they're having some sort of experience with it, it's a lot easier for them to grasp and understand.

[10:31]

All right, for second grade, the Next Generation Science Standard that I pulled was 2-LS2-2: Develop a simple model that mimics the function of an animal in dispersing seeds or pollinating plants.

So the fall seasonal sign here is that in the fall, squirrels get ready for winter by caching or hiding nuts to eat in the winter time when there's not as much food around. So the activity that I decided to use for this game is squirrel cache capture the flag. So it's essentially traditional capture the flag, but with a little bit of a squirrel caching twist.

So to play this game, create three flags per team. And if you want to be able to have that squirrel connection more apparent, your flags could be two different sets of acorns. So you could have like three orange acorns and three brown acorns. Or you could have three orange handkerchiefs that you draw acorns on and three brown handkerchiefs that you draw acorns on.

So what you're going to do is you're going to explain to your students that it's fall and squirrels hide their acorns to use as food over the winter when food is hard to come by. So they're going to be in charge of working with their teammates to hide their acorns in places that the other team won't find them during the "winter".

You're going to show the students their boundaries, and then you're going to split them into two different squirrel teams. And again, if you want to add that squirrel twist in there, you could even give each team a squirrel species for their name, and that could enhance the fun. So here in Michigan, we have fox squirrels, we have gray squirrels, we have red squirrels.

You can even go as far as chipmunks or groundhogs, because they're ground squirrels. But if you want to use tree squirrels, like I said, we have fox squirrels, gray squirrels, and red squirrels. So I could pick fox squirrels versus gray squirrels, or red squirrels versus fox squirrels.

So then you're going to give them time to hide their three flags, aka acorns, and then inform them that it is winter, and it's time to find food in the other team's boundaries. So remind them of your capture the flag rules. And if you don't have any yourself, you could include rules like:

• You can pass the middle line into the other team's boundaries to find their flags. But if you get tagged there, you have to go to their jail.
• If a member of the other team enters your boundaries, you can tag them with your hand and bring them to jail. And make sure your tagging is below the neck in a safe way.
• If a student grabs a flag but gets tagged, they have to drop the flag on the ground and go to jail. And that team has to leave the flag on the ground, and they can't babysit it.
• And then once a student grabs a flag, they have to pass the middle line to their side without being tagged to get to keep the flag.

And the first team to gather all the flags from the opposing team wins. Or the team with the most flags captured by the end of the allotted time wins. So you could allot 30 minutes.

And if one team has collected two flags and the other team only has one, then the team that has two wins. After the game is played, the remaining flags represent acorns that didn't get eaten and would sprout in the spring. Just like in nature when there are acorns that are missed by wild squirrels.

And this is one of the ways that animals actually help spread seeds. Because there are squirrels that forget where they put their food, and then those acorns end up sprouting into new trees.

[13:46]

For third grade, the Next Generation Science Standard that I pulled was 3-LS2-1: Construct an argument that some animals form groups that help members survive.

So the fall seasonal sign for this is, as animals migrate south for the winter, they often do so in large groups. And that's because they're less likely to be picked off by predators if they're in a large group than if they're individuals traveling on their own. So the activity for this grade is a migration tag.

So you're going to play two rounds, and each time you're going to have two players that are it, and all the other players are going to be birds or insects. And so in the first round, what you're going to do is each player is going to be on their own. They're going to be trying to survive getting away from the it players.

And this time, instead of season tag, where the it players tag and then those people become it, what you're going to do is the it player is a predator. And so when they tag another player, they're consuming them, they're eating them. So they actually have to go sit out.

So this round is similar to birds and insects when they travel on their own. They can be picked off by predators. Then you're going to play a second round where you have one or two players that are it, but all of the other players are moving together in a mob.

And so this round actually represents migration as a group. What I want you to do is I want you to play for maybe five minutes each round to see how many people end up consumed by the predators or the it players. And then I want you to have a conversation after both rounds are done, and have them express their experiences to you.

Some students might find that the solo travel was easier for them to avoid predators, because they often end up on the outside of the group when it comes to the mob or the group migration. But most of your students will actually find that it's easier to avoid predation when they're on the inside of the big group versus traveling solo. So it will create a very interesting discussion, and it will make them critically think if they think it's a good technique for survival.

[15:56]

For fourth grade, the Next Generation Science Standard that I pulled was 4-LS1-2: Use a model to describe that animals receive different types of information through their senses, process the information in their brain, and respond to the information in different ways. So the fall seasonal sign for this one is that as summer dwindles and turns to fall, animals are seeing the changes in the amount of daylight, and that actually triggers their innate behavior or instincts to start getting ready for winter.

So this could look like hiding food, eating a lot of food, and gaining weight, they could stop eating food altogether to get ready to sleep, and many more other adaptations. So the activity for this one is going to be Fall 20 Questions.

So this is kind of a two-parter. So you're going to have each of your students observe a classroom or home pet, and also a wild animal in the fall. So I want you to have them create a one-page profile with a hand-drawn picture of those animals that they're going to display on a board, and I want you to have them give a brief description of their animals to the class.

So what will you have them look for? You'll have them look for: if they're still eating, if they're changing their color, if they're losing hair, if they're getting more hair, if they're sleeping more, those sorts of things, if there's going to be a shift in behavior. So this might take a couple of weeks, and they'll just kind of make some notes, and then they'll draw a picture and give you the nitty gritties on the changes in behavior.

And the reason that you're having them watch a pet and a wild animal is because pets tend to not have as many innate characteristics anymore, whereas wild animals rely on those innate characteristics to be able to survive. So you're having them watch an animal that doesn't change, like your pet, and an animal that has to change because they live in the wild, and that's the only way for them to survive. So then after they create that one pager, you're going to put them up on a board where everyone can see, and then you're going to print all of the different animal names and cut them into slips.

And then you're going to have a student draw out an animal name, and the rest of the class is going to try to figure out which animal they drew by asking up to 20 questions based on the information that you guys have been collecting together as a class. And then you can decide how many students you want to go. If you want to give everybody one opportunity or just go through volunteers, however you want to do it, they've done the observations and now they're using that information to inform questions to be able to figure out what animal that person drew.

[18:27]

And then lastly is fifth grade, and the Next Generation Science Standard that I pulled for that one was 5-PS3-1: Use models to describe the energy in the animal's food used for body repair, growth, motion, and to maintain body warmth, was once energy from the sun. And so the fall seasonal sign for this standard is plants stop making their food in the fall because they can sense the changes in the amount of available sunlight. So for this one, the activity that I'm suggesting is a photosynthesis relay.

So to prep for this activity, this one, you actually have to get a few materials for. I try to avoid that, but this would be a really powerful experience for your students. So you're going to get some poker chips, which you can snag from a dollar store on the cheap, right?

One, two bucks. And you want to make sure you have at least three colors, and it'd be nice if there was a green or something green-like as one of the colors. You'll also want to scope out two different areas in your schoolyard.

One that has a lot of sun and some shade, and another that has a lot of shade and some sun. Both should be open and available for movement and running. And what you want to do with those spaces is you want to seed these spaces by sprinkling your colored poker chips onto the ground, providing plenty of each color except your green. You only want to have a few of those green poker chips out there.

Once you're ready to play this with your students, you're going to explain to your class that they'll be working in groups to make photosynthesis happen. If you look at the photosynthesis equation, plants take six carbon dioxide atoms and six water atoms, plus energy from the sun and chlorophyll to make one atom of glucose and six atoms of oxygen.

So in order for your teams to complete photosynthesis, what they're going to do is they're going to have to move around your game space and collect six poker chips of one particular color, let's say white, that represents carbon dioxide, and six poker chips of another color, let's say blue, that represents water. But they're going to have to do this while holding hands in a line because they're a leaf and leaves can't disconnect to go collect things. They have to stay as one piece.

So only the person in the front of the line that has an open hand can collect a poker chip at a time. So once the front person moves with their group holding hands, once that front person finds the color chip that they need, they break off, disconnect, and run to the back of the line, leaving the next person available to pick up their poker chips. Once everyone in line has gone through and collected their blue and their white poker chip, now the whole group moves together while holding hands still and tries to find a single green poker chip that represents chlorophyll.

Once they do that, they all have to get into sunlight to complete the photosynthesis. So they have to physically move their leaf into an area of sunlight to be able to complete their photosynthesis relay. You're going to do this playing two rounds.

The first round you're going to do in the sunny location, and this is going to simulate summer, where there's plenty of hours of daylight. And then you're also going to do it in the area that's mostly shady and that's going to simulate fall where there's not as much sunlight. And now the trees are realizing that it's time to stop their growing season.

Once you've explained this, then you're going to split your class up into groups of six, and have them form human chains by holding hands, and they're going to give this a try, again, with two rounds. As a bonus, not only does this game work them through photosynthesis and how all organisms' energy comes from the sun, but it also works on their teamwork skills. They're going to have to work really hard to be able to do this together.

[22:17]

So in a nutshell, we talked about six fun fall activities for grades K-5, aligned to Next Generation Science Standards. For kindergarten, we talked about season tag, where your students are going to walk, run, and jog to be able to simulate different seasons. For first grade, we talked about day and night hopscotch, where you're going to have six different hopscotch sets set up, representing different amounts of daylight.

For second grade, we talked about squirrel cache capture the flag, where your students are going to be hiding acorns for the other teams to try to find. For third grade, we talked about migration tag, where you're going to play two rounds, one where everybody is on their own, and another one where everybody is working together as a group. For fourth grade, we talked about fall 20 questions, where you're going to have students observe two different types of animals, and then try to get other students to guess in 20 questions, which animal they've drawn from a hat.

Then for fifth grade, we talked about photosynthesis relay, where students are going to work together to be able to create the photosynthesis equation through teamwork.

Thanks for taking time to listen today. I know you're busy and I truly appreciate the time you take to do so. If you have any questions, wonderings, or fun fall activities that you use, get a hold of me on Instagram at naturally.teaching, or you can email me at victoria@naturallyteaching.com. And don't forget to check out the show notes for this episode at naturallyteaching.com/episode17, where I'll have links to things that I mentioned and anything I think might be helpful. So thanks again for joining me today.

And until next time, keep exploring, keep learning, and keep naturally teaching.

Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode of the Naturally Teaching Elementary Science podcast. I hope you found it informative, inspiring, and full of actionable insights to enhance your science teaching journey. Connect with me on social media for more updates, science tidbits, and additional resources.

You can find me on Instagram and Facebook at naturally.teaching. Let's continue the conversation and share our passion for elementary science education together. Don't forget to visit my website at naturallyteaching.com for all the show notes from today's episode.

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