22 Pumpkin Activities for Kids at School – The TPT Blog

Autumn is synonymous with pumpkins! This cherished orange vegetable serves as decoration, dessert, and creative jack-o’-lantern designs. How can you incorporate Halloween’s favorite gourd into your classroom learning?

Expand your ideas beyond just field trips to pumpkin patches and festive classroom displays – pumpkins can be valuable educational resources. Integrate these pumpkin-themed activities into your STEM, ELA, math, and art lessons to enhance student engagement and creativity.

Get Your Class Excited with Pumpkin Worksheets

Preschool students are passionate about pumpkins, so take advantage of that energy with engaging pumpkin activities crafted for 3- and 4-year-olds, as well as UPK classrooms and autumn-themed Kindergarten lessons. From worksheets to learning centers, pumpkin-focused activities turn learning into an adventure.

This preschool activity pack features 15 worksheets and 16 centers that cover essential concepts like letter matching, counting, shapes, and crafting. These resources are perfect for morning tubs, small groups, and can be easily printed for use on sub days.

Stand Out with a Spookley the Square Pumpkin Reading Companion

Spookley the Square Pumpkin adds excitement to your literacy time. This reading comprehension unit is centered around this delightful children’s book, allowing you to meet CCSS in Reading Literature while keeping learning festive.

This comprehensive bundle is packed with resources that focus on essential comprehension skills such as making predictions, story mapping, retelling, character analysis, and sequence of events. You’ll also find art project guidances, writing prompts, rubrics, record sheets, and easily usable comprehension questions.

Boost ELA Engagement with Pumpkin Activities

Fall activities for kids can extend beyond science and STEM subjects. Integrate pumpkins into your ELA lessons as part of a small group or as a warm-up activity.

This activity helps students sharpen their close reading skills with a pumpkin-themed text that emphasizes context clues, complete with an answer key and contextual questions to aid instruction.

Unleash Creativity with Pumpkin Coloring Activities

Through roll-and-color exercises, students engage in playful practice. Each dice roll promotes number recognition and following directions, making pumpkin activities suitable for kindergarten centers or small group settings.

This free eight-page PDF offers clear instructions for the roll-and-draw pumpkin activity along with a color-by-number page. The focus on fine motor skills and visual perception makes it an excellent fit for special education and occupational therapy classes.

Fall in Love with Pumpkin Art

Students will relish this creative pumpkin activity as an autumn art project or a delightful brain break.

This thrilling 30-page bundle keeps October fresh with its engaging instructions, drawing guides, templates, print-and-go activities, and colorful samples, ensuring every student stays motivated and challenged.

Try Out a Pumpkin-Themed Escape Room

Revitalize math lessons with this rounding activity where students must “round their way to escape.” This math escape room serves as an ideal end-of-chapter review or a lively Friday math game.

Unlock the excitement with a quickstart guide, detailed instructions, tips, Google Form access, a printable case file, and a convenient QR code for seamless use. The activities encompass rounding, identifying place value, and solving rounding puzzles.

Transform Pumpkin Activities into a STEM-tacular Celebration

Halloween, pumpkins, and STEM – a delightful combination! While you may think of pumpkins in terms of jack-o’-lanterns and spooky fun, they also lead to interactive engineering and problem-solving challenges through pumpkin STEM activities.

This fall, elevate your STEM lessons with three engaging challenges: a pumpkin catapult, candy towers, and a spiderweb bridge. Each activity includes lesson plans, slides, student instructions, rubrics, and supply lists.

Investigate the Science of Pumpkins

While pumpkins adorn your classroom, their true wonder resides in biology. Utilize NGSS plant observation standards to guide students in exploring the biological principles that define what makes a pumpkin unique.

Students engage with Google Slides and a digital pumpkin flipbook to delve into the anatomy, storage, and growth processes of pumpkins. They can define various parts and compose descriptions using digital notes.

Explore a Pumpkin’s Life Cycle

The life cycle is a fundamental concept in elementary science, and autumn provides an excellent opportunity to study it through pumpkins. From their development to decay, pumpkins facilitate hands-on investigations of living organisms’ transformations, paving the way for a comprehensive science curriculum in October.

This all-inclusive resource bundle features science notes, vocabulary cards, graphic organizers, diagrams, flow maps, and captivating activities, making it an ideal cross-curricular resource for both science and ELA.

Ignite Interest in the Scientific Method

Looking for a pumpkin activity for science centers or inquiry-based learning? This weekly exploration of pumpkins provides hands-on discovery coupled with engaging scientific investigation.

This unit includes daily activities, data tables, analysis worksheets, and measurements. Adaptable for various learners, it connects to the scientific method and guides students through making predictions, hypothesizing, and data collection.

Add a Touch of Creepiness

Blend the excitement of pumpkin carving with science by exploring exothermic reactions. Students will investigate catalysts and scientific theories through this engaging Halloween-themed experiment.

This 45-minute activity comes with a four-page PDF, delivering all the necessary information for educators to understand and facilitate the experiment.

Spin Your Way into Fall

To energize Fun Fridays, give students a spinner to bring movement into their games! Challenge them to design their own pumpkin spinners and brainstorm games they can create.

This seven-page PDF project features 16 color and line art spinner illustrations with one to eight segments. The vector images can be enlarged and printed multiple times without loss of quality.

Explore Simple Pumpkin Activities for Low-Prep Fun

Engaging in pumpkin-centered activities doesn’t have to be complex. Try a quick and entertaining idea for those moments of free time in your classroom. These activities can seamlessly be included in substitute lesson plans.

• Pumpkin-themed scavenger hunt
• Paper plate pumpkin creations
• Tissue paper pumpkin art
• Potato stamp pumpkins
• Pumpkin seed counting games
• Marble painting pumpkins
• Writing pumpkin poems
• Creating jack-o’-lantern collage artworks
• Alphabet pumpkin matching
• Play dough pumpkin sculpting

Discover Pumpkin Fun with TPT Activities

Learning during the fall can be both enjoyable and challenging! Infuse your math, ELA, STEM, and art lessons with elementary activities featuring pumpkins. Once completed, these projects can double as classroom decorations or bulletin board pieces, or be sent home with students to extend the pumpkin fun!