Pumpkins Preschool Theme!

My favorite Fall Theme is pumpkins!

We went to a pumpkin patch as a family last night so we were all ready to talk about pumpkins the rest of the week.  My older children will be out of school Thursday and Friday so we won't have formal preschool then, but we will be painting our pumpkins.

 Here is my son at the pumpkin patch.  He found a cute little pumpkin that he thought looked just the right size for him.

We measure the pumpkin in all the ways we could think of.  How tall it was, how wide, how long the stem was, and so on.

 My son wanted to roll the pumpkin across the kitchen floor and measure how far it rolled so we did that too.  :)

We love to do "Five Little Pumpkins".  I usually do it once with these visuals and then again and have them do the finger actions and roll around like a pumpkin at the end.

 We talked about the life cycle of a pumpkin using sequencing cards.  I have not been able to locate the link I found these cards at years ago, but this is a fun idea we actually did last year with the pumpkin life cycle.

 There are some really great Pumpkin Packs out there.  Here are a few Confessions of a Homeschooler's Pumpkin Printable Pack.

 1+1+1=1 and  A Teaching Mommy has a pumpkin printable pack.and  also have Pumpkin Printables.

 Lawteedah has a Halloween Kit with pumpkin printables.

3 Dinosaurs also has a free pumpkin printable pack.

My son also enjoys visiting Starfall's website and building his own pumpkin. We also watched this Super Why clip that shows how to spell "pumpkin".

You can check our more ideas from previous years.

2010

2011

2012

2013

 (there are three parts for 2013 year so be sure to check out the links after this post)

Letter P/Pumpkins Part 2

This is the second part of our Letter P/Pumpkin activities.  You can see the first part from yesterday here.

What better way to talk about pumpkins than to visit a pumpkin patch!  We did that together as a family before my hubby went to work.  We have a great time and it is a great hands on experience for the kids.

Here are my beautiful children making jack-o-lantern faces for me.  

 Guess what my little guy found all on his own?  Two letter P's!  He was so excited about it too.

Looking at all the pumpkins.

My little man picked out a pumpkin just his size.

Another thing we did at home was cut open a pumpkin and look inside.  My oldest was the only one that would reach  in and get some seeds out.  Usually, I only have one taker and it just depends on who it is.  

I like to have my kids paint their pumpkins.  It is so much easier than carving and doesn't lead to so many frustrations. 

Here is my little man with his painted pumpkin.

Tomorrow we will do a few activities with the pumpkin seeds that we pulled out of one of the pumpkins.

Check out part 1 of this post here and part 3 here.

Letter P/Pumpkins Part 1

 Today we talked about the letter P and what better thing to talk about that starts with the letter P this time of year than pumpkins!

Five Little Pumpkins rhyme for the flannel board is always a favorite.

Of course, we used Confessions of a Homeschooler's letter p for pumpkin activities.

2 Teaching Mommies has a fun pumpkin printable pack.

This Halloween Tot-Kit has some fun pumpkin activities.

Check out 1+1+1=1's two different pumpkin tot-packs that are full of great activities.

Here is a pumpkin poem:

This pumpkin is happy

This pumpkin is sad

This pumpkin is tired

This pumpkin is mad

Cut them up in pieces small

In pumpkin pie they are best of all

Sadly, I don't have a resource for these because I have had it for so long, but I imagine it'd be easy to come up with your own visuals for the poem.

We also talked about the life cycle of a pumpkin and did this little pumpkin craft that reinforces the steps a pumpkin goes through as it goes from seed to pumpkin ready to be picked. I found the link with printables here.

Here is a close up of it.

My son wanted to paint (of course) and I had this coloring page in my stash so I don't have a resource for it, but it is easy to search lots of pumpkin coloring pages.

Check out what we have done with pumpkins in previous years in 2012, 2011, 2010.

This is just part one of our pumpkin theme.  My older boys are out of school for the rest of the week so I plan on involving them in the rest of our activities.

Check out Letter P/Pumpkins Part 2 here.

Check out Letter P/Pumpkins Part 3 here.

Pumpkins, Pumpkins, Pumpkins

We have spent the last three days doing pumpkin activities!  We've also had my first grader home yesterday and today and he wanted to do activities with us as well.  There is so much fun pumpkin things out there!

There are two great pumpkin printable packs here full of great activities including this one here where your child cuts out a shape with a jack-o-latern and glues it to the matching shape.

 This is a great free activity that goes along with the Five Little Pumpkins poem. We also did the flannel board story with it.

 My son cut out the different pumpkins and glued them in the order that they belong in the story.

My son also had fun coloring this pumpkin coloring page.

We also did activities from this Pumpkin Printable Pack.

As well as this Halloween Tot Pack.

And activities from P is for Pumpkin Pack.

You can check out our pumpkin activities from previous years as well.  2011, 2010, 2009

Yesterday we went to a pumpkin patch and picked out pumpkins.  We had a great time!

 My preschooler found his pumpkin!

 I also encourage the kids to paint their pumpkins since carving them is too difficult for them to do alone.  They had a great time.  There was a little fight over who had to wear the pink apron.  Guess I need another boyish apron in the house.

Today we did cut one of the pumpkins open to see inside.  I don't know why, but none of my boys actually like sticking their hands in the pumpkin to pull the seeds out.  In the words of my two year old, "That's yucky."  My first grader kind of braved it, but I did most of the work.

 We did a few activities with the pumpkin seeds.  They had to match the right number of seeds with the number written on the pumpkin here.  Then we counted our pumpkin seeds.  We grouped them by 10's and counting 308 seeds!

 My two year old just loved playing with the seeds.  It's a great sensory activity!

There is our last three days worth of activities in a nut shell.  It's been fun!

Pumpkins

I think we could spend a few weeks talking about pumpkins.  There are so many wonderful ideas out there.  On Friday we went to a pumpkin patch.  All of my boys had a great time.  They each picked out a pumpkin and we brought them home and painted them.

Today we did these lovely activities which is basically what we did last year so you can check out what we did in more detail here.   You can also see what we've done in previous years here.

You can find the whole pack that has this cute little guy in it here.

A great online activity to do involving pumpkins can be found on at Starfall.

Here are some more ideas that would be a lot of fun to do.

Pumpkin Life Cycle

Awesome Pumpkin Pack Printables

How a pumpkin grows and other fun activities

The Home Teacher posted a great collection of pumpkin ideas