Fall Counting Activities Using Nature’s Objects (FREE Printable)

It’s our favourite time of the year and we are spending more time outdoors observing the change in season and gathering objects from mother nature!   In my Instagram, I’ve been posting pictures of the boys gathering chestnuts, conkers, pine cones and acorn outdoors and bringing them home.  If you’ve been following my blog, we call them “nature finds” and at home, the boys would play with them, mostly exploring the objects (texture, smell and color) and of course, counting how many items they collected.


With this, I've recently arranged our shelf (it hasn’t been changed since summer), and included autumn-themed tray activities to go along with the season.  The highlight of this post though, are the counting activities we do at home using the objects we gathered outdoors.  They’re not put to waste, unless they rot.  So here are the easy to prepare counting activities for this season, without spending a penny!

Pine Trees Counting

We collected a lot of pine cones a few weeks ago, and I just have to use them as counters because they’re just too beautiful!  So I made this pine tree sheet as a backdrop for our counting activity.  Here Vito draws a wooden number card and would place the right amount of pine cones indicated by the number card.




This pinetree activity sheet can be downloaded for free. Click here to get a copy.  Hope you like it.

Chestnuts for Cards and Counters

This is a Montessori math activity but instead of the traditional materials, we are using our Autumn themed number cards and the chestnuts that the boys have collected.  These nuts are everywhere!  They keep on dropping since the start of the month and the kids enjoyed picking them up from the ground, trying to get the best looking chestnut!


Count as You Go

Don’t wait till you get home to count… as I mentioned, count as you go!  Pick up pieces of sticks, acorns, nuts, pine cones, leaves and count them right away.  To encourage your child to count, you ask them from time to time how many objects have they collected already.  I often do this with Vito, and he would pause for awhile, gather his objects then starts counting.  And to follow up, I would ask him if that’s enough or he wants more.  Simple ways of practising math in real life right?


Grid Game

And what else is best? We used these nuts for our grid game too!


Here I made Vito a squirrel grid so we can “feed” or give the hungry squirrel some nuts for them to keep and feast on this winter time.


Nature’s Objects as Counters

We mixed and matched them for counting.  This was the time when I was clearing up our front yard with sticks and Vito brought our basket outdoors to explore.  I asked him if he could get them and he immediately ran inside, took our number cards and counted the objects “cards and counter” style.  You can see more photos of that here.



What do you think? Do you have other ideas? I’d like to hear from you, so we might try them too!

For more Autumn themed ideas below is a list of our past activities:

• Autumn Themed Preschool Math Activities
• Autumn Nature Finds and How We Use Them
• Cork Stamping Art: Trees In Autumn
• What is Montessori “Cards and Counters”?
• FREE Autumn Leaf Matching Cards
• Letter L: Leaf Activities in Autumn

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