Making Learning Fun

Autumn Rainbows

This is a great activity for mid October to the end of November, when nature has her full palette of colours available. You can do this activity in groups, pairs or by yourself!

The aim is to create a rainbow on the forest floor with the colours you can find in nature. If you are using this as a group activity, it’s good to divide into teams and make everyone aware that if you are picking berries, not to pick too many in one place, so we leave enough for wildlife.

This activity is good for letting the children explore the area and find colours for themselves. Our groups were keen to find out the names for what they had found and they eager to find all of the colour groups. The hardest to find were blues and purples. One group found sloes and some of the last blackberries. This group found a very late flowering piece of buddleia which finished off their rainbow perfectly.

What do you taste?

This game can either be used as a fun addition to learning about the taste buds or can be a great party game.

If you’re doing this as part of a group, you’ll need to make sure you are aware of any allergies by checking with parents.

For using as a group activity, it’s easiest to ask everyone to bring a mug of teaspoons and something to blindfold themselves with.

Everyone puts their blindfolds on and offers their teaspoons to have a mystery food put upon it. After eating, the blindfolds come off so you can write down what you believe each of the foods to be. The blindfolds are then put back on for the next taste challenge.

It’s much harder than you think, it shows you just how much your expectation of what you are going to eat affects how you taste it. Nobody in our group could identify tomato ketchup, one person thought it could be marmalade!

Foods you could try…

Jam, marmalade, mayonnaise, a drip of soy sauce, some baked bean juice, ketchup, tomato juice, tahini, kiwi, cucumber, mushy peas, mashed potato, mint sauce, lime pickle, rice pudding, mashed banana, mango chutney, oat milk, mashed avocado….