Dobbies garden centre in Swindon is running a free children's workshop on Sunday 1 November as part of its monthly Little Seedlings Club, teaching young attendees about the journey of a leaf: why it changes colour, why it falls, and what happens to it once it is lying in your gutter refusing to leave.
The session, aimed at families with primary age children, will also cover why leaves come in different shapes and sizes, how fallen leaves feed the soil and shelter wildlife, and will end with a craft activity in which children make their own paper plate leaf wreath to take home. Places are free and can be booked through the Dobbies website, which is more organisation than most of us manage for half term by this point.
I'll be honest, by day three of the holidays I had already read the words 'what shall we do today' enough times to consider becoming a leaf myself and quietly falling off something. So a free, pre planned, two hour window in which someone else supplies the glue sticks is, frankly, an act of public service.
In theory, this is wonderful: proper outdoor learning, seasonal science, a craft to display on the fridge for exactly nine days before it is quietly binned. In reality, half term with small children is a logistics operation with snacks, and anything that occupies forty five minutes without a screen counts as a significant win.
Clive, who 'helps', has already suggested we could simply do this ourselves at home with leaves from the garden, at no cost. This is true. It is also true that it would end in an argument about whose turn it is to find the scissors, so we are going to Dobbies.
Brenda Pask, 72, of Old Town, who has lived there since before it was old, said she didn't see why anyone needed a workshop to learn what a leaf did. 'In my day you went outside, a leaf fell on you, and that was the lesson. Nobody made a wreath out of it. Ron used to just put them on the compost and tell us that was science.'
Either way, half term rolls on, the leaves keep falling, and for one Sunday morning at least, somebody else is in charge of explaining why.