50 Fall Bucket List Activities For Your Family

As the hot summer days give way to cooler temperatures, the leaves start turning beautiful shades of yellow, orange and red, and pumpkin spice fills the air and all your senses, you begin to notice that fall is here.  Every year it happens, so it is not surprising but for some saying good-bye to summer is hard.  I mean who doesn’t love the freedom and lazy days of summer??  However I am ready for fall.  Like, so ready.  I was the one that decorated my front porch and house before September 1st and got my first Pumpkin Spice Latte from Starbucks on the day it was released even though it was over 90 degrees that day.  A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do, am I right?!  Fall is the second favorite season only to Christmas in our house.  Being together as a family is the best way to experience all that is this time of year.  Here are a few ideas you can do as a family and add to your bucket list.

Adventures:

• Go apple picking
• Tailgate at a football game
• Visit a haunted house
• Attend a fall festival
• Visit a pumpkin patch
• Go to a sunflower farm
• Take a road trip or nature hike in the fall foliage
• Navigate through a corn maze
• Go to the zoo
• Visit a graveyard (if you dare)
• Go on a fall-themed scavenger hunt

Activities:

• Jump in a pile of leaves
• Go on a hayride
• Sit by a campfire
• Carve or paint pumpkin
• Tell ghost stories
• Make a trick or treat bag
• Countdown to Halloween
• Plant bulbs for spring
• Trick or treating
• Make a scarecrow
• Create a grateful tree
• Go on a fall picnic
• Collect pinecones
• Decorate your front porch
• Watch a festive or scary fall movie
• Make a fall craft
• Bob for apples
• Make bird feeders
• Backyard camp out
• Volunteer as a family
• Pick out your Halloween costumes
• Make hand print turkeys
• Read fall themed books
• Burn a fall scented candle
• Take your fall family photo
• Host a Halloween party

To Eat:

• Bake a pumpkin pie
• Roast marshmallows for smores
• Sip on hot apple cider
• Make homemade applesauce
• Snack on candy corn
• Make pumpkin spice pancakes
• Decorate fall cookies
• Try a new pumpkin recipe
• Make pumpkin rolls
• Bake apple dumplings
• Homemade chili
• Make caramel apples
• Roast pumpkin seeds
• Bake an apple pie
• Drink hot chocolate

 

If you are a Fort Wayne, Indiana peep, then here are a few of my favorite places to visit:

1. Kuehnert Dairy Farm Fall Festival
2. Pumpkin Patch at Hilger Family Farm
3. Cook’s Apple Orchard or Apple Tree Technology
4. Apple Festival of Kendallville
5. Fort Wayne Zoo- Wild Zoo Halloween
6. Kurtz Pumpkin Patch
7. Haunted Houses-Haunted Fear Factory, Haunted Castle & Black Forest, The Haunted Jail
8. Escape Rooms- Fort Wayne Escape Room, Hysterium Escapes, and many more
9. Johnny Appleseed Festival
10. Botanical Conservatory Punkin’ Path and Pumpkin Zone
11. Salomon Farms Fall Harvest Festival
12. Amazing Fall Fun in Waterloo, IN
13. Cedar Creek Produce
14. Fall Hike @ Fox Island County Park or Lindenwood Nature Preserves
15. Fright Night Downtown
16. Old Fort Lantern Tours
17. Moose Lake Fall Festival

 

So now that you have picked out your must-do activities, you could write them out on a piece of paper but what fun is that?  Let’s live a little and create an actual bucket for your bucket list.  Pun intended.  The kids will take so much joy in picking out the stick to determine the next family fun activity.

So what will you need:  (I got everything at Micheals except the candy)

• Small bucket
• Large popsicle sticks
• Paint (fall colors)
• Foam brushes
• Fall filler (candy corn)
• Sharpie
• Chalkboard sign (if your bucket doesn’t have one already)

I think the directions should be pretty self-explanatory.  Start by painting all the sticks and let them dry.  Then write the activities that you picked on each stick.  Finally place the sticks in your bucket filled with candy corn or other filler and you are done.  So so easy right?

I hope this gives you a few new ideas to do with your kiddos this fall.  What are some of your favorites?