We love autumn, it is the absolute best time of year to collect so many fantastic natural things that are literally falling off the trees.  We like to bring home colourful leaves, acorns and conkers (horse chestnuts) they are all great for crafts and play.  Here's our favourite ways to play and learn with conkers!

Play and Learn with Conkers

They are great for counting, while we collect them we count them all up, then we count them when we're at home too!  It's great fun going out to a park where we know we will find lots of them and see who can collect the most conkers and bring them back to me.  It's also great for their observational skills as they scour the ground for the conkers that blend in with all of the leaves.



When we bring the conkers home we have have fun giving them a good wash.  I like to fill a bucket with soapy water and give the kids some clothes and a scrubbing brush and just leave them to wash and play for as long as they want.  Then we leave the conkers to dry on a towel before playing with them.



It's great to sort out our conkers as well, we used a cupcake tray to put our conkers into sections and count them all up.  Ivy also sorted out the big ones and the small ones into the different trays and could even sort them by colour, sorting out the different shades of brown.



Conkers are also great to hide things in or use in sensory bins, I hid Ethan's site words in a tray full of conkers and he had to find them all and read them to me then put them into another bowl.  It just makes reading his sight words a bit more interesting then me just holding up the cards for him.



We also explore and discover with our conkers.  One day Ivy brought one of the conkers that she was playing with over to me in the kitchen and asked me to cut it open to find out what was inside.  I carefully cut it open and she was fascinated by the hard shell and the soft inside of the conker and examined each piece carefully, it was lovely to watch her curiosity in action.



We also love to make crafts with our conkers, they're great for sticking onto things and making into different things like these Pumpkin Conkers.

Funnily enough we've never actually tried playing the traditional game of conkers, maybe next year!  What do you like to do with conkers?



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