FALL LOOSE PARTS PLAY IDEAS

December 26, 2019

Easy, simple and fun – and great for their development. Here’s a small list of fall loose parts play ideas you can try this season!

Fall is one of those seasons I love to romanticize and forget the realities of. While fall brings cooler weather and beautiful walks it also brings a lot of rain and mud for us!

Loose parts play is a great activity option for kids. Loose parts play usually has an easy setup, fast cleanup and is a great playing option when you have various ages to entertain and teach. You can use materials easily found around your house, in nature or at the store so it’ll fit into any household budget.

I’m a sucker for themed play invitation so here is a collection of fall loose parts play ideas we have done and loved!

EXPLORING FALL COLOURS

Fall is full of beautiful colours. To throw this one together, I went down into the storage room and pulled out a bowls worth of anything red, yellow and orange we had. Plastic lids, plastic animals… Making sure there was a variety in shapes and textures. Then added some fall flair with our fake leaves and the potpourri.

They mainly made fall bits and bobs soup in their flower pots, then dumped them out and started over. But it allowed us to practice skills such as colour identification, shape identification, stacking, racking and more.

Materials Used:

Active World Tray
Learning Resources alphabet lacing beads
Wooden blocks
Popsicle sticks
Love Child squeeze pouch lids
Thrifted wooden circles
Fake leaves
Learning Resources Counters
Thrifted potpourri
Various sand & kitchen utensils

SMELLS LIKE FALL

Much like above, while I was thrifting I came across a bag of fall theme potpourri for $1 or $2 and grabbed it for loose parts play.

Kiddo had fun looking at the different pieces and asked about what each of them were. She had fun scooping the lentils into the bowls and practiced moving the bigger pieces with the tongs. The potpourri still smelled slightly, so it was a nice smelling activity too!

Materials used:

Ikea Flisat table
Thrifted wooden bowls
Hape magnifying glass
Ikea Duktig utensil set
Lentils
Thrifted fall potpourri

ALL ABOUT PINECONES

This one was an idea that came about while on a walk through the Greenbelt at the beginning of fall. The ground was covered in different pine cones so we collected them for activities at home. Once we had a good collection I set up the active world tray for us to look through them all.

I used the wicker plates to sort based on type and we explored the stages of pinecones as they grow, compared the pinecones and talked about the differences, and more. Since we own the sensory bottles from Michaels I pulled them out for the more delicate pieces, such as our tree bark, so they could be explored without being destroyed.

In a usual habit, exploring the pinecones and the pine tree pieces ended in the making of a pine cone loose parts soup.

Materials Used:

Active World Tray
Sensory Bottle
Pine tree bark (taken from the ground)
Pine leaves
Baby pinecones
Mature pinecones
Tongs
Hape magnifying glass

INDOOR LEAF PILE

I was thrifting at the end of the summer and found an enormous bag of fake leaves for $1 or $2 and immediately snatched it up – while I love real leaves, I also loved the idea of having a stash of fake leaves that I could quickly pull out and wouldn’t leave a mess behind. We also live in a townhouse who’s part of a condo board with a company who comes and does leaf collection on a regular basis – no giant piles to jump in here!

Leaves were raked, thrown, built into piles, stacked, thrown into buckets… Everyone had a different idea of how they wanted to play with them and that’s okay. We talked about the different colours, why leaves change colours and how people rake them up when they fall. Some other topics you could cover are what kinds of bugs and animals love to live under the layers of leaves, how collected leaves can be used in compost instead of being thrown into landfill.

Materials used

Active World Tray
Fake leaves
Small buckets, shovel and rake (We used sand toys)

There you have it! Four fall loose parts play ideas. There would have been more, but we spent most of time outdoors this fall soaking in the nice weather before the snow and cold arrived.

Be sure to check out some of our other fall themed activities below!

EASY FALL SENSORY BIN

FALL PLAYROOM INSPO

HALLOWEEN SENSORY BOTTLES

LAMINATED LEAF PUZZLE TWO WAYS