Autumn videos for toddlers and preschoolers: leaves, rain and squirrels

The leaves are coming down, the wellies are back by the door, and half-term is on its way. For a toddler or preschooler, autumn is full of things to point at: conkers, mushrooms, a squirrel in the park, puddles to jump in. A video about the same thing is a nice way to go over it again at home.

We looked at what KidsTube has about autumn. This is what we found, series by series.

For the youngest

• Caillou has Caillou Rakes the Leaves and Pumpkin Patch Kid. Gentle, everyday stories about things a small child does too.
• Sesame Street has I Love the Rain with Elmo and Grover, and a longer episode collection where Elmo plays in rain, snow and sun.
• Nat Geo Kids has several short clips of baby squirrels, and one on hedgehogs and other night animals. Real animals, thirty seconds at a time.

Songs to sing along to

Autumn songs work well because they're short and you can sing them again outside afterwards.

• Super Simple Songs has Five Little Pumpkins, a counting song, and Rain Rain Go Away.
• StoryBots has its own Rain, Rain Go Away too.

Halloween, if you want it

Halloween comes at the end of the month, and there's quite a bit of it in the catalog. The gentlest ones are from Super Simple Songs, like Can You Make A Happy Face? and This Is The Way We Carve A Pumpkin, and Pocoyo goes trick-or-treating and does Halloween crafts. Some other Halloween videos are about haunted houses and monsters, so it's worth a look yourself before putting one on for a younger child.

Search for more

To find more, search for leaves, pumpkin or squirrel. The search looks at video titles, so what turns up depends on what the creator called their video.

Then go outside

The best part of an autumn video is what comes after it. A child who has just watched Caillou rake leaves often wants to do it too. A few ideas:

• Look for what you saw in the video: an acorn, a conker, a red leaf, a mushroom (look, don't touch).
• Sing the song again outside. A song your child has just heard sticks better when you sing it together.
• Bring a leaf home and put it next to the screen next time. Then your child knows exactly what the video is about.

And on a properly wet day, when going out really isn't happening, a calm autumn video together on the sofa is fine too. Happy autumn!