Parts of Speech Fall Scavenger Hunt

What You Need:

• Three pieces of fall colored construction paper for sorting parts of speech (or three baskets)
• Craft leaves, construction paper leaves, or real leaves (check out your local hobby store)
• Newspaper 
• Dark colored permanent marker (you can also use tape on top of the leaves if you plan to reuse them)
• Sentence strips 
• Bucket or basket for collecting leaves
• A variety of fall-themed words. Some ideas include:
  • Adjectives: gold, red, yellow, brown, crunchy, chilly, colorful
  • Verbs: jump, run, dance, sweep, play, walk, sing, drop
  • Nouns: tree, jacket, football, apple, branch, wind, fort

What You Do:

1. Get out the fall colored paper and write one part of speech on the top of each piece.
2. Spread the newspaper on a table or flat surface and put the leaves on top. 
3. Write a variety of fall-themed words on each of the leaves, making sure you have a similar amount of adjectives, verbs, and nouns altogether (see examples above).
4. Hide the leaves all over your house or outside (make sure your child doesn’t peek).
5. Explain to your child that when you say, “On your mark, get set, go,” they need to run around the house (or yard) to find all the hidden leaves.
6. Give your child a bucket for collecting the leaves, and allow your child time to find the leaves, providing support as necessary.
7. Once your child has found all the leaves, explain that now they need to sort the leaves into the correct pile. Review the parts of speech with your child (i.e., an adjective describes something, a noun is a person, place, or thing, and a verb is an action that you can do).
8. Give your child time to sort the leaves into the correct piles. Support them as needed.
9. Review the piles and challenge your child to say complete sentences using an adjective, verb, and noun. Your child can change the tense of the verb to create their sentences (e.g., I run through the gold leaves or I ran through the gold leaves). 
10. Finally, have your child write their creative sentences on sentence strips. 

Extension Ideas:

This engaging fall scavenger hunt activity can be used to reinforce many different math and literacy skills. 

• Sight word fun: If your child is learning their sight words, modify the game by writing a sight word on each leaf. 

• Basic math operations: Write basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division problems on each leaf. Next, have your child sort the leaves into piles based on their operation (e.g., addition and subtraction).

• Act it out: Continue the fun by having your child act out their parts of speech sentences. For example, your child might pretend like they are running through the gold leaves.