This autumn get into the season by celebrating the harvest festival and all of God’s amazing creation with these themed ideas.

1. Get Creative: Harvest Collage

Create a Harvest themed collage to display in your church ready for the Harvest Service which will take place towards the end of September. Using a roll of lining paper (or similar) the children can paint, draw and colour to create a great visual celebration of this significant festival. You could also go out and collect leaves and twigs which could be used on the collage.

2. Get Active: Playing Conkers

It is a game which has been played every autumn for generations but these days fewer children play it. Why not revive this pastime by going out and collecting conkers, and holding your own conker tournament with your section.

Preparing your Conker

First of all you need to go out and collect some conkers up, you could do this as an activity with the children or in preparation of your meeting night. A leader will then need to make a hole through the middle of the conkers using a skewer. Cut pieces of string about 30cm in length and thread the strong through the hole in the conker and tie a knot at both ends.

How to play Conkers

1. Wrap the string around the hand, with the conker dangling (approx. 20cm of string should be showing) – the conker should be kept absolutely still and held at arm’s length.
2. Each player has three attempts to hit their opponent’s conker with players taking turns until one of the conkers breaks and you have a winner.

You could declare a winner the number of hits and/or ‘windmills’ if there is no winner after a certain number of turns.

4. Get Active: Fruit Relay

Purchase or bring in a variety of different fruits, ideally you need enough items of fruit for each child. Fruits with a protective skin will be better for this activity like melons, oranges, bananas, kiwis, pineapples.

Get the children into teams and place the fruits on a table at least 3m in front of each team. In turn, team members go to the table and pick up an item of fruit and run back to their team to release the next team member before going to the back of the team. Go through the whole team, so that each team member collects an item of fruit and remains holding this. Once the game is completed and winner declared take the opportunity to talk about each of the items of fruit, you could talk about its colour, texture, where it comes from and see who has eaten it before.

5. Get Active: Autumn Leaf Characters

Equipment

• Leaves
• A4 Paper/Card
• Colouring Pens
• Paints
• Glue
• Wiggly Eyes

Instructions:

1. The first step to completing this craft is to take the group outside to pickup some leaves to use. If you can take the children outside somewhere they can pick up some different leaves this will be something a little different for them as well. You could encourage them to get some different colours, shapes and sizes. If its not possible a Leader will need to pick up some leaves in preparation of this activity.
2. Starting out with the paper, stick the leaves on the piece of paper.
3. Using colouring pens or paints add some features to make your leaf characters.
4. Finally add wiggly eyes.