Autumn is one of the most beautiful seasons of the year (at least we think so!). If you love this season as much as we do, check out our ideas on how to add autumn vibes to your lessons.
Use chestnuts
- Use chestnuts instead of counters for the board games.
Don’t forget to ask students to write their names (or make any design) on the chestnuts. A black marker will do great.
- Use chestnuts as speaking tokens.
What are they?
In a group class, give each student 3-5 chestnuts (depending on the number of students and the duration of the class). During a discussion activity, whenever they want to speak, they have to give up one token. Their task is to get rid of all the tokens by the end of the activity. It works great for the groups where you have talkative students who tend to take over the class and the quieter ones, who don’t participate very much.
Use autumn leaves
For any activity that requires the use of small pieces of paper (or post-its), use autumn leaves instead. Collect a few large leaves and write discussion questions on them. Distribute them among the students for discussion.
If you have smaller leaves, use them for verbs. Write a verb on each leaf and distribute them among the students.
Get them to:
- produce past and past participle forms
- make sentences with the verbs
- use them in discussions
- use them to write a story
Autumn warmers
Use autumn warmers, even if the topic of your lesson is not connected with this season.
You can use short activities such as:
- this or that
- short discussion questions
- bingo
- photo descriptions
You can find 40 ready-to-use warmers for your autumn classes HERE.
Autumn activities
Change your ordinary activities to autumn ones. Gap-fills, grammar exercises, matching – if you’re writing them yourself, try to incorporate some autumn details.
You can write grammar activities on the topic of autumn, for example:
Last autumn I (go) ______ to England.
I like (collect) _____ autumn leaves.
Tomorrow we (have) _____ pumpkin soup for dinner.
Background music
And finally, something that requires no prep on your side – have some relaxing autumn music playing in the background (at a very low volume, of course!). We even picked three tracks that you can play directly from your computer:
- Lo fi music, which can be played throughout the class – listen to it HERE
- Autumn jazz, which is a bit more upbeat and will probably work best as background to group work (while you’re not doing any talking) – listen to it HERE
- Music & nature – Very relaxing and can be played throughout the whole class – listen to it HERE.
We hope these ideas will add a touch of autumn magic to your lessons!