20 Fall Outdoor Activities for Kids — Leaf Hunts, Apple Picking & More

The best fall outdoor activities for kids take advantage of what makes autumn unique — colorful leaves to collect and identify, apples and pumpkins to pick, migrating birds to watch, seeds to gather, cooler temperatures that make active play comfortable, and a natural world visibly preparing for winter. Fall is arguably the best season for outdoor play. The oppressive heat of summer is gone, the biting cold of winter has not arrived, and the landscape is putting on its most dramatic show of the year. These 20 activities are organized by type so you can find the right adventure for any autumn day, whether your child is two or twelve.

Why Fall Is the Best Season for Outdoor Play

Every season has its gifts, but autumn may offer the most. The temperature range — typically 45 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit — is ideal for sustained physical activity. Children can run, climb, dig, and explore without overheating or freezing. The air is crisp. The light is golden. The bugs are mostly gone.

Fall also offers something no other season can match: visible change. Spring changes happen gradually, almost imperceptibly. Fall changes are dramatic and fast. A tree that was green on Monday is orange by Friday and bare by the following week. This rapid transformation captures children's attention in a way that slower seasonal shifts do not. They notice. They ask questions. They want to understand.

This natural curiosity is the foundation of science education, and it costs nothing to nurture. All you need is time outside and a willingness to follow your child's observations wherever they lead.

If your family has been building outdoor nature habits through the warmer months, fall is where those habits deepen. The skills children developed in summer — observation, exploration, comfort in nature — now apply to a landscape that looks, sounds, and smells entirely different.

Leaf Activities (Ages 2-10)

1. Leaf Collection Walk

The simplest fall activity and often the most engaging. Walk through a neighborhood, park, or trail and collect leaves. Challenge children to find as many different types as they can. Compare colors, shapes, sizes, and textures. Press favorites between heavy books at home. A leaf collection walk works for every age — toddlers love the physical act of picking up and carrying, while older children can identify species and create organized collections.

2. Leaf Identification Challenge

Bring a field guide or use a free plant identification app. Challenge children to name five, ten, or twenty types of trees by their leaves. Oak, maple, birch, elm, poplar — each has a distinctive leaf shape. This teaches classification, a foundational science skill, through hands-on observation. Many children become genuinely passionate about tree identification once they start noticing differences.

3. Leaf Pile Jumping

Rake the biggest leaf pile you can manage and let children jump, dive, roll, and bury themselves in it. This is pure, unstructured physical joy. The sensory experience — the crunch, the smell, the slight dampness, the way leaves stick to clothing — is rich and grounding. Let them stay in the pile as long as they want. There is no rush.

4. Leaf Art and Crafts

Bring fall leaves indoors and create art. Leaf rubbings (place a leaf under paper, rub with a crayon) work for all ages. Older children can create leaf collages, leaf animals (glue leaves to paper to create creatures), leaf crowns (tape or staple leaves to a strip of cardboard), or press leaves between wax paper with an iron for sun catchers.

5. Leaf Maze

Use raked leaves to create paths and walls of a maze in the backyard. Children navigate the maze, rebuild sections, and design increasingly complex layouts. This combines physical activity with spatial reasoning and creative design.

Harvest Activities (Ages 2-10)

6. Apple Picking

Visit a local orchard and pick apples. Let children reach for fruit, fill bags, and choose their favorites. Follow up at home by baking apple crisp, making applesauce, or simply eating the apples with peanut butter. The farm-to-table connection is powerful — children who pick their own food develop a different relationship with eating.

7. Pumpkin Patch Visit

Beyond selecting a pumpkin, spend time at the patch. Count pumpkins. Compare sizes. Estimate weights. Find the smallest and largest. Examine the vines and leaves. Many pumpkin patches also offer corn mazes, hayrides, and farm animals, making it a full-day fall outing.

8. Seed Collecting and Saving

Fall is seed season. Collect seeds from flowers (sunflowers, marigolds, zinnias), vegetables (dried bean pods, squash), and trees (acorns, maple helicopters, pinecones). Store them in labeled envelopes. Plant them in spring. This teaches the plant life cycle through direct experience across seasons — one of the most powerful nature lessons you can offer.

9. Corn Maze Adventure

If you have access to a corn maze, this is one of fall's best family outings. Children practice navigation, spatial thinking, problem-solving, and cooperation as they work through the maze. The tall corn walls create a sense of adventure and contained wildness that children find thrilling.

10. Fall Cooking Outdoors

Build a small campfire or use a fire pit and cook a fall meal outside — roasted apples, campfire popcorn, or foil-wrapped sweet potatoes in the coals. Cooking over fire is a primal experience that connects children to basic survival skills and makes ordinary food taste extraordinary.

Nature Exploration (Ages 3-10)

11. Fall Nature Scavenger Hunt

Create a list of fall-specific items to find: a red leaf, a yellow leaf, an acorn, a pinecone, a spider web, a mushroom, a seed pod, an animal preparing for winter, something that smells like fall, something that crunches underfoot. For detailed scavenger hunt lists and tips, see our complete guide to nature scavenger hunts.

12. Bird Migration Watch

Fall is migration season. Set up a bird feeder and binoculars, and spend time watching which birds visit and which are passing through. Geese fly in V-formations overhead. Hawks ride thermals. Songbirds gather in flocks. Talk about where the birds are going and why. This introduces ecology, geography, and the concept of seasonal cycles.

13. Squirrel and Animal Observation

Fall is when squirrels and chipmunks are most active, gathering and burying food for winter. Sit quietly in a park and watch. How do squirrels choose where to bury acorns? Do they remember where they buried them? (Research says they find only about 74 percent — the rest become trees.) This is accessible wildlife observation that works in any neighborhood.

14. Mushroom and Fungi Hunt

After fall rain, mushrooms appear everywhere — on lawns, on tree trunks, on fallen logs. Go on a mushroom hunt and observe (but do not eat) the variety of fungi. Photograph different types. Notice the gills, caps, colors, and growth patterns. Fungi are neither plant nor animal — they are their own kingdom, and that fact alone fascinates children.

15. Nature Journaling

Give children a sketchbook and colored pencils. Sit outside and draw what they see — a tree changing color, a specific leaf, a bird at the feeder, the sky. Encourage observation over artistic perfection. Date each entry. Over weeks and months, the journal becomes a record of seasonal change that children are genuinely proud of.

Active Fall Play (Ages 2-10)

16. Backyard Obstacle Course (Fall Edition)

Create an outdoor obstacle course using fall materials: jump over a log, run through a leaf pile, balance on a garden border, toss acorns into a bucket, army crawl under a rope, carry a pumpkin from one station to the next. Time each run and challenge children to beat their own records. For more obstacle course inspiration, check out our indoor obstacle course guide and adapt the ideas for outside.

17. Scarecrow Building

Build a scarecrow together using old clothes, straw, sticks, and a pillowcase head. Children stuff the clothes, draw a face, choose a hat, and position their creation in the yard or garden. This is a collaborative building project that produces a visible, lasting result — the scarecrow stands guard for the entire season.

18. Kite Flying

Fall's steady breezes make it ideal kite season. Buy an inexpensive kite or make one from a trash bag, sticks, and string. Head to an open field. Running with a kite provides vigorous physical activity while teaching children about wind, aerodynamics, and persistence (because kites rarely launch on the first try).

19. Backyard Camping

Cool fall evenings are perfect for backyard camping — set up a tent, lay out sleeping bags, and spend the evening outside. Roast marshmallows, tell stories, look for constellations, and listen to the nighttime sounds of autumn. Even if you come inside to sleep, the evening adventure is the memorable part.

20. Harvest Garden Cleanup

If your family has a garden, involve children in the fall cleanup. Pull spent plants, collect the last vegetables, turn compost, plant garlic cloves for spring, and spread mulch. This is real, useful work, and children take pride in contributing. The garden cleanup also sets the stage for spring planting — a promise of continuity that children find reassuring.

Making Fall Outdoor Play a Habit

The After-School Outside Rule

Commit to 30 minutes of outdoor time before going inside after school. The autumn light is too beautiful and too brief to waste. Pack a snack and head to the backyard or park before homework, screens, or indoor routines take over. Even on busy days, this half-hour resets mood, burns energy, and provides the nature exposure children need.

Weekend Adventures

Choose one weekend activity per week from this list. Alternate between active play (obstacle courses, kite flying) and slower exploration (nature journaling, scavenger hunts). Children need both. The active play burns physical energy. The slower activities build observation skills and attention.

Embrace the Weather

Light rain, grey skies, and mud are not reasons to cancel outdoor time — they are reasons to adjust expectations and clothing. Some of the best fall moments happen when the weather is imperfect: the smell of wet leaves, the sound of rain on a hood, the squelch of muddy boots. Waterproof layers and a change of clothes solve most weather objections.

Fall Is Fleeting — Go Now

Autumn lasts roughly eight to ten weeks in most climates. The leaves turn, the light shifts, the temperature drops, and suddenly it is winter. There is an urgency to fall outdoor play that does not exist in the long, slow days of summer. This urgency is actually useful — it motivates families to get outside now, today, this afternoon, because next week the leaves might be gone.

Use that urgency. Build the leaf pile today. Pick the apples this weekend. Go on the scavenger hunt before the rain. Fall's gifts are extraordinary, but they are temporary. The children who experience them carry the colors, the smells, and the crunch of autumn leaves with them long after the trees are bare.

If you are looking for screen-free activities for toddlers, fall provides some of the easiest wins — a pile of leaves, a basket of acorns, a walk through crunching leaves. No prep required. No cleanup necessary. Just open the door and step outside into autumn.