Whether you plan to decorate the entire classroom or only have a bulletin board display, there are many fall themes to choose from. Consider decorating your bulletin board to look like a football field, complete with your students' names on helmets. Hang red, orange, yellow and brown cut-out leaves from the ceiling. Use a back-to-school theme, including pencils and apples, as your theme for September; a Halloween theme, with black cats and pumpkins, in October; and a Thanksgiving theme, with turkeys and cornucopias, in November. If you don't want to use holiday themes, consider using a harvest theme.
Teach your students about the changing seasons with crafts. Kinderplans suggests an art activity that instructs the students to draw or paint trees with falling leaves. Explain how the leaves drop in the fall and then grow back in the spring. Younger children can trace their handprints on paper plates and then draw turkeys on the handprints. Take the students outside and have them gather acorns, leaves, twigs and pinecones. Instruct them to glue them to construction paper or paper plates to create decorations for their homes. Give students craft supplies to make Halloween masks. Other crafts include decorating pumpkins or making puppets that look like squirrels, scarecrows and turkeys. Lead a classroom cooking project and make pumpkin-flavored pudding. Pass out sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds and let the students paint them and decorate paper plates in their own unique designs.
There are many autumn lessons appropriate for preschool-aged children. Teach them about the harvest period and how farmers use the fall to gather all their crops. Bring in corn on the cob or strands of wheat and ask the students what types of food they create. Teach the students songs about squirrels or other creatures, such as bears, and talk about how most animals need to stock up on their food supply in the autumn so they have food to eat in the wintertime. When you are making Thanksgiving crafts, use the opportunity to tell the story about the first Thanksgiving and how the first Americans met the Native Americans.