This week at Little Bean’s school they are starting to talk about Autumn so after school today I decided to take Little Bean and Beanie Boy on an Autumn Treasure Trail. I gave each of them a food bag and said that we needed to find Autumn Treasures so that Little Bean could take some to school to show her friends and teachers.
Both of my tiddlers love to get out and about for a discovery walk, when it rains we go “puddle jumping” and although it hasn’t been raining very much here lately there were still a few puddles around for them to jump in. They loved collecting all the different treasures, I showed them all the berries on the trees and explained that although we could look at them we couldn’t actually eat them because they would make them very poorly. I said that we needed to leave the berries on the bushes for the birdies and small animals as it was special food for them in the winter.
We talked about the different colours that we could see around and Little Bean asked why some leaves on the trees were green whilst others were yellow or red and the ones on the ground were brown so I tried (in my best child speak) to explain that during the summer the trees love the sunshine and take water from the ground to make them big and green and full of colour but as the Autumn comes the sun doesn’t shine so often and it rains more so the leaves begin to fall and just before they fall they turn yellow and as they are dying on the ground they turn brown. She seemed pretty happy with my explanation – phew!
We found all sorts of treasures on our walk, conkers, leaves of all different shapes and sizes, red berries, blackberries, old seeds and the odd cone. When we got home I thought it was rather strange to see one of the leaves walking across the kitchen worktop and quickly called Little Bean to show her that one of her leaves was in fact an insect. She wasn’t too keen and Beanie Boy tends to squash anything smaller than him so I popped the leaf-like insect out of the window before it got squished!!
What did you do today?