Autumn Inventors (Science/STEM) -- October Enrichment Curriculum & Workbook

🍂 Introducing Autumn Inventors: How Nature Inspires Us 🍂

Autumn Inventors is a four-week nature science and STEM curriculum for children ages 2–9. It invites children to slow down, observe the natural world, ask thoughtful questions, and use nature’s designs as inspiration for their own inventions.

Throughout the curriculum, children explore:

🍁 Clever Leaves

Discover how leaf shapes, veins, and surfaces help plants collect light and move water. Children complete a leaf investigation and design a leaf-inspired shelter.

🕸️ Wonderful Webs

Explore spiderweb patterns, silk, strength, spacing, and tension. Children create model webs and test how much they can support.

🌱 Traveling Seeds

Investigate how seeds travel by wind, water, animals, gravity, and bursting pods. Children sort seeds and design a model that spins, glides, or falls slowly.

🎃 Strong as a Pumpkin

Study pumpkin parts, ribs, shape, structure, weight, and buoyancy. Children investigate whether pumpkins float and build structures inspired by a pumpkin’s form.

The accompanying student workbook gives children space to:

• Draw and record nature observations

• Make predictions

• Document experiments

• Plan and improve designs

• Reflect on what they discovered

• Work through activities at their own developmental level

The curriculum is designed for flexible use with families, siblings, homeschool groups, and co-ops. Younger learners can touch, sort, draw, match, and dictate. Older learners can measure, compare, explain, record evidence, and revise their designs.

Children are encouraged to follow the inventor’s process:

Notice. Wonder. Imagine. Build. Test. Improve.

Autumn Inventors combines nature study, science, engineering, creativity, and meaningful outdoor learning in a gentle, hands-on format. It is a month of noticing the clever designs already growing all around us. 🍁