Pre-Kindergarten 2021/22/23: Pre-KG 2025/ 26 Blog 8 Colours and Shapes of Autumn

Pre-KG 2025/ 26 Blog 8

The Colours and Shapes of Autumn

Autumn in Japan is always still quite warm, with lovely sunshine and a myriad of activities to do! There are events galore from Sports and Culture days, Moon Viewing, Shichi–Go–San Shrine, Rice and fruit harvest celebrations as well as Autumn foliage festivities.

Depending on what country you are from this season also incorporates Oktoberfest, Thanksgiving, Diwali, Mid–Autumn festivals, Halloween, Dia de los Muertos and others.

Autumn has many colours associated with it, mainly attributed to the different hues of the leaves ( yellow, orange, red, brown etc.) and shapes which can be easily distinguished .

Even children can recognize a pumpkin shape and in Germany the shape of a hedgehog ( Igel) is ever present. This animal hibernates in winter and can be seen busily looking for food and sleeping quarters in autumn before its long sleep from November to March. Hedgehogs are protected in Germany and should not be touched or disturbed.

So to tune into some autumn fruit and vegetables, the children looked at their boxes of toy food in the classroom kitchen and started to sort them: all carrots together, then grapes, bananas, strawberries and lastly potatoes. Many of these have an easily recognizable shape and some of them are harvested in autumn.

While we do not have any toy persimmons or toy sweet potatoes, we talked about them as on Friday we would go with the friends from EY to harvest them in the nearby field.

And what a great experience it was for the children! They first used shovels as the ground was a little hard and loosened the soil, then they pulled with all their might.

You can see from their faces how proud they were to harvest such big sweet potatoes.

We are drying them at school and will make something yummy with them!

One of the pleasures of autumn is collecting leaves and acorns and you can make beautiful art with them.

So this week we also went on an autumn exploration walk with K1 to the nearby park and all the children were overjoyed at finding lots and lots of acorns. They had a lot of fun on this outing and they worked together so well with some friends holding the buckets to bring the bounty back to school.

The Pre–Kindergarten children would use these acorns and leaves for their amazing autumn Mandalas. They started by colouring the image using a big brush and autumn colours and then carefully positioned leaves and acorns.

I fixed all parts with a glue gun for a stunning result and the children were very excited about their art work.

For our autumn display the Pre–Kindergarten children also coloured some Maple leaves and showed good fine motor skills and an individual sense of colours.