Learning the four major seasons is an important cognitive activity for younger children in preschool or kindergarten. Seasons are quite exciting and awesome to explore with a child who is just starting to understand what they are.
We live on a planet where, with every change in the season, our surroundings change rapidly, too. From the colors of the leaves to the color of the rain and the skies, the four seasons are distinct elements young children must learn about.
Listed below are a few activities that you can enjoy with your kids to teach them about the changing seasons!
Interesting Seasons Activities For Kids
Summer, Winter, Autumn, or Monsoon, keep reading to know how your kid can become a seasoned pro!
Season Pie
Observe different seasons in a picture book with your kid and inspire them to make a season pie of their own. The right ingredients to bake this pie are a pair of crayons, some awesome observation skills, and an understanding of the different seasons.
You can teach your child the different seasons by having them split a circle into four parts and color and draw each pie part with a different season.
Pro Tip:
Alternatively, you can bring out a paper plate and divide it into four halves. Bring out a marker and spice up this craft activity by drawing the different elements of each season in each segment and asking your child to point them out!
Hand Print Tree
Help your child paint their palm and hand with the color green and place it on a white sheet of paper.
Ask your kid to draw a few leaves and then progress to make another print. Make four hand prints and help your kid draw the leaves of different seasons on the trees.
This is a great nature bond activity.
Boutique-ing
Cut out a few clothes from magazines and place them on a table, make four sections of a blank sheet, and place it in front of your child.
Now, ask your child to separate each piece of clothing and sort them into four different seasons. This is an awesome activity that is sure to also instill some fashion interest in your kid!
Season Sort
For this particular activity, label four paper bags with the different seasons of Summer, Winter, Spring, and Autumn with the help of your child. Now, pick out some family photos and pictures of your young one and place them in a pile.
Now, ask your kid to place each photo within the paper bag corresponding to the season. You can also ask your child to draw some related doodles on the paper bag that correspond to the season.
Season in a Bottle
This activity allows the season to become immortal by storing it in a time capsule sort of space. Pick out a few important elements of each season and motivate your child to go seek them out so you can store them in a glass bottle for them.
This could be the green leaves and ice cream sticks during summer or the distinct autumn leaves during autumn.
You could also put in some craft snowflakes that they can make out of paper to double this as a cool craft activity!
Movie Association
Pick out respective movies for each season and create a movie night with your kid to associate the season with the movie you are looking to impart to your child.
Watching some classic movies like Home Alone or Frozen for the Winter makes for a great movie association.
Ask your child to point to the different distinctions that make the season in the movie what it is!
Reading a season book
Go along on a little trip with your kid to the nearest bookstore to pick out a book on a season. I would prefer a picture book that is easy to understand and relates to the different seasons.
You can help navigate the different seasons from the picture book and indicate what makes a season what it is.
Pro tip:
A great book to read is A Tree for All Seasons by the National Geographic Society. It gives you some pictorial representation to indicate to the children and helps them associate changing nature as well.
Ice Cream cones
Use slime on a blank sheet of paper with your kid to create some fake ice cream cones to reinstate the summer season.
This doubles as a great activity to craft during summer. Most children enjoy the texture of slime and the different colors to make different ice cream flavors and so.
Pro Tip:
Ask your child if they would like to season the ice cream as well. Bring out different colored beads and help your kid place them within the slime with a pair of tweezers to make a sprinkled ice cream!
Decorate The Tree
Print out the skeleton of an autumn tree from the internet for your child and place a few numbered indicators on the branches. Now, help them cut out different shades of yellow, maroon, and red colored leaves.
You can now ask them to place each leaf on the numbered branches and ask them to make a fully decorated tree from the fall!
Pro Tip:
Leaf matching was a great cognitive activity for me and my kid! We had loads of fun snipping and cutting the differently shaped leaves of the fall, and he was able to recognize fall later this year with the color of the tree!
Stamp it out
I’m sure your young ball of joy plays around with a few Legos. Lego bricks double as a great stamp and can be an awesome tool for some crafts for each season.
Print out a few outlines of pumpkins for the fall, snowmen or snowflakes for the winter, and summer-themed beach umbrellas, and bring out the paints.
Now, all your little one needs to do is dip the Lego block into a few colors and stamp these season elements into color!
Turkey Making
A great Thanksgiving and fall season staple is the Thanksgiving Turkey. Make a memory with your child with just some paper bags and markers to make some Paper Bag Turkeys!
Fold the lower end of the paper bag and glue on some googly eyes along with your kid on this end to make a turkey face.
Next, stick a few feathers that your kid may have snipped up from some colored paper, and voila! Here is your turkey.
Season’s Smoothies
Another classic activity is seasonal smoothies. Pick out a magazine or the newspaper and a pair of safety scissors.
Now, hand over these to your child and help them pick out a few beverages for each season; it could be color-related or ingredient-related.
Now scrapbook these cut beverages to make a few smoothies for each season. This cool craft activity is sure to make your young one ask you for a cup of cocoa or a refreshing glass of lime juice in the winter or summer!
Marshmallow Words
Both a fun and a brain-building activity, marshmallow words are a great activity for the winter. Pick out a handful of marshmallows and create a game on your kitchen counter similar to Scrabble.
Help your kid make a few words out of the marshmallows before you dip them into a mug of hot cocoa.
This is awesome at a young age as it helps them build some brain activity while having fun at the same time!
Play Dough Coal
Ushering in Santa Claus is a huge part of Christmas, from the Christmas tree, stockings, gifts, and letters to Santa to the coal.
This is a great activity to include this lump of coal. Pick a few play dough parts and ask your little one to roll them into balls and place them in a glass jar to make your lump of coal!
Pro tip:
You can also help them make little stockings or gifts out of the play dough along with the coal to bring in the Christmas spirit.
Mitten Crafts
An excellent activity for the wintertime is making craft mittens! Draw out some mitten shapes on colored paper, and your kid can cut out different fashionable colored mittens from these.
They can also decorate these mittens with beads or glitter as they wish and make them a fashionable statement!
Coffee Filter Snowman
Pick out a coffee filter from your kitchen cabinet and place it on a table for your kid to get creative with. Making a few coffee filter snowmen is a great winter activity.
They can also cut out parts of the filter to make little snowballs and tint them with paint for the eyes of the snowman!
Pro tips:
Crinkle the coffee filter at places so it can retain paint, and it is easy for your child to paint out some eyes for the snowman. My little one and I had a fun time making these cute snowmen and blotting their facial features!
Coffee Filter Flowers
Another excellent spring craft activity! Coffee Filter flowers are a bliss to make. Since they crinkle and are easy to blot, the texture of this raw material makes it very easy for your kid to make a few spring elements.
Hand over a few coffee filters and ask your kid to blot some paint in them and make a coffee filter flower bouquet!
You can also show them some pictures of spring flowers for inspiration on how to paint the flowers.
Read in Spring!
There are a bunch of great picture books and children’s books for spring. One of these is It’s Spring! By Samantha Berger.
Read these books out in the time of spring to help your child make some pictorial association with spring.
Reading together is also a great bonding activity for young children and builds on their capabilities!
Umbrella Crafts
Pick some upturned baskets and caps lying around to craft out an umbrella! This will help you teach your kid about monsoons.
You can even paint the baskets or cover them with cloth with the help of your child and teach them how it protects them from getting wet!
Let it Rain! By Maryann Cocca-Leffler
A great children’s monsoon book is Let It Rain. With a gripping storyline and some great pictures, this book is an essential monsoon read for kids.
As a follow-up to the umbrella craft activity, you can ask your kid to point out the umbrellas in the book as well.
Sing The Season Song
Kids learn best through song, music, dance, or pictures. With such relative memory strength, a way to go about teaching them the different seasons is also through song.
Pick a song that already exists with a catchy tune and rhyme scheme, or make one of your own!
Autumn, spring, summer, and rain learn the seasons in a brainy way! You can take their help to come up with the words and tune and make this a cool and engaging activity that they will not forget for years to come.
Conclusion
Those were some excellent activities that maintain the fun while teaching your children about the different seasons that we experience and the bliss of each!
I hope these were sufficient for you to brainstorm a few ways that you can impart some teaching about the changing seasons. I had a bunch of fun compiling them!!
Comment down below if you would like me to add a few more activities or if you have any feedback for all the activities already listed above. – I would love to hear your thoughts and feelings! 💗
I’m a former teacher (and mother of Two Childs) with a background in child development. Here to help you with play-based learning activities for kids. ( Check my Next startup Cledemy.Com)