Ideas for Harvest Festival Learning

I wrote a couple of weeks ago I wrote about how lockdown learning was getting a bit tiring and I was losing enthusiasm somewhat. I decided that what we needed was some short, sharp focussed activities to work through. I decided to take a look at Pawprint Badges and choose some of their projects to work through with the children.

What are PawPrint Badges?

Pawprint badges are woven badges that you can purchase. They’re arranged around different themes and each badge comes with a list of associated activities that you can do to ‘earn’ the badge. My older two, in particular, love the badges as we sew them onto their camp blankets.

You can view the range of badges here. Each badges has an assoicated challenge pack which details a really broad range of things that children can do. These are split into Craft, food, games and other.  It’s suggested that children complete a range of these challenges to ‘earn’ the badge.]

Earning the Harvest Festival Badge

Harvest was something that I was naturally looking at over September and October, so I thought I would make use of some of the ideas in the challenge pack. My approach was to go through the pack and note down everything that seemed like the children might enjoy.

Once I had that list, I added in the things we were naturally going to be doing anyway. Once I had everything, I made a note against things I thought we might be able to do via zoom with some of the children’s friends.

I then set up some short zoom sessions and invited people to attend. It ended up with my three and two other families joining in which was nice and consistent. I’ll share shortly the activities we did via zoom as I think that’s how our winter months will be conducted.

Collating the work

I like creating project books with the children. I find it a great way of pulling together their work in a certain area for them to look over once it’s all complete. For this, I used some of these folders and as they created more work and crafts, I glued them together.

Some of the things that we did included:

• Making scarecrows
• Learning about Sukkot
• Making popcorn in a pan
• Using Hama beads to make a scarcrow / leaf images
• Learning about Pongal festival and making Rangoli patterns
• Playing Harvest Bingo
• Playing a fruit or vegetable? game
• Harvest moon walk and learning about the moon
• Learning about how food is harvested in the UK
• Learning about the types of machinery used in UK harvesting
• Writing a harvest poem / story
• Collected harvest donations to donate to the local foodbank

There was probably more that we did as well, that fell into the general day to day of life. But these were the main things we did. We spent around two to three weeks on this project and wove it in and around the other general work that we were doing. I also made use of harvest themed sheets from Twinkl. The main ones I used are below:

• Wordsearch
• Comprehension Activity
• Harvest festival powerpoint
• Poetry Frames
• Pattern Matching (for H)

We really enjoyed using Pawpring Badges to frame our learning and I’m planning to do their autumn badge and Remembrance Badge over the coming weeks with the children.