Home Educating in Autumn: Our Journey with My 5-Year-Old
Autumn is a beautiful season to be home educating in the UK. The crisp mornings, falling leaves, and cosy evenings seem to invite a slower, gentler rhythm of learning. With my 5-year-old daughter, I’ve found autumn to be one of the richest times of year for discovery and creativity.
🍂 Nature as Our Classroom
Most days, we head outdoors, even if it’s just for a short walk. My daughter loves gathering leaves of every colour — her little pockets often bulge with acorns, conkers, and sycamore helicopters. We press the prettiest leaves together for her scrapbook and already line the windowsill with jars of autumn treasures. We basically started on Autumn in August - what can I say, mum is a pumpkin spice latte fan.
One of her favourite things is watching squirrels dart about, collecting food for winter. We’ve also started keeping an eye out for migrating geese flying overhead, which always sparks questions about where they’re going. We heard some this week which was so exciting after our summer adventures with the swifts, swallows and house martins.
📚 Autumn Learning, Gently Woven
The beauty of home education is that learning flows naturally from what we notice around us:
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Science: We will be talking about why leaves change colour. I plan on on us making spore sprint paintings with mush
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Maths: Conkers become counters, and last year she loved lining them up, sorting them, and comparing their sizes.
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Literacy: Inspired by the changing colours, we will make up silly poems about the leaves and anything else we see
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Art: Leaf rubbings ( as may leaves are already falling) have already become a calming afternoon activity, and she loves turning pinecones into tiny owls with felt and glue. My daughter is the princess of glue!
🎃 Celebrating the Season
My daughter looks forward to every seasonal celebration:
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At Harvest, we talked about where food comes from, and she helped bake apple crumble with windfallen apples we got from a neighbour. We have frozen batches of apple pie filling too
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For Halloween, well I am of course obsessed. She enjoys dressing up and is planning her costume, we have grown some pumpkins and we are already listening to not-too-spooky stories.
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Bonfire Night brings excitement, and we will learn about Guy Fawkes this year while making firework pictures with bright chalk pastels.
☕ Cosy Moments Indoors
As the afternoons draw in, learning often shifts indoors. We can't wait to bake biscuits, sip hot chocolate while reading stories, and creating lanterns from jam jars to light up the darker evenings. I have already set up a little hot drinks cupboard in the corner of the kitchen.
One of my daughter’s favourite cosy rituals is snuggling under a blanket with a stack of picture books, fairy lights twinkling around us. It’s these small, gentle moments that make autumn feel magical.
🌦 Following the Season’s Rhythm
Home educating a 5-year-old in autumn means following her curiosity and the rhythm of the season. Some days are filled with collecting and creating, others with reading and resting. Autumn reminds us to notice small changes, to embrace the beauty of nature, and to make learning feel as natural as breathing.
✨ For us, home education in autumn isn’t just about lessons — it’s about weaving wonder, warmth, and togetherness into everyday life.
