Once upon a time, I was an insatiably curious young girl asking my parents ‘why?’ and my desire to understand how things worked spurred me on to study science at school and university. So, when my 6-year-old asked “Mummy, may you teach me how to be a scientist?” my heart nearly burst with pride and a small tear pricked my eye.
Armed with a pencil and a notebook, we’re going to explore the world, do some experiments and record our findings…! I’m blogging about it for The Motherload®, so you can join in with your kids too.
Having figured out what we need to do to become scientists, my daughter and I found the perfect opportunity to put our science skills into practice – armed with a plastic tub, a camera phone and a notebook, we set out on a walk to collect as much autumn as we could find!
The first interesting thing we found was a sweet chestnut tree. At first, we thought it was a horse chestnut because the ‘spiny cupules’ scattered on the floor looked a bit like the spiky cases that conkers grow inside. But, when we opened them up, we found that the nuts inside were smaller and a different shape.
Next, we found some oak trees. We collected acorns and their cups, although I think the squirrels got there first and took all the big ones!. We also studied the leaves that had fallen from the tree and noticed that they varied in colour from green to yellow to brown. We decided to collect some of all the colours to make a picture with when we got back home.
We also found a tree with dark blue/purple berries. We think it’s a type of blueberry tree but we didn’t eat any, just in case we were wrong!
As we continued our walk, we saw leaves, nuts and berries of all different colours. We decided that autumn smells a bit damp and soily, and my daughter said that “autumn sounds like a big group of squirrels rattling their nuts – like maracas!”
We discovered that autumn is a great time of the year to step outside and learn about nature. We used all our senses to make observations about the changes that the season brings and we collected or took photos of the interesting things that we found. When we got home, we made an autumn picture as a record of our nature walk.
We’d love to see what interesting autumn changes you have spotted, too! Why not use the comments section to share a photo, picture or video of your autumn nature discoveries?
Like this? Why not try one of our Autumn Activities?
About Kate
I’m 38 years old, mother of two girls, wife of one bloke and owner of one cat. I like singing, step aerobics, stationery and organising stuff. When I grow up, I’d like to write science books for children.
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