Pumpkin Investigation Activities {Science & Art}

We went to the market and picked out our pumpkins!  The kids have been begging me to get pumpkins so we did, I’m not sure if they’ll make it until Halloween.

This whole week we focused on all things pumpkin in our homeschool.  The kids loved it and hopefully they learned a little bit more about the life cycle of pumpkins. The fun thing is I was able to integrate the boys lessons with my preschooler because a lot of it was so hands on and interesting it kept his attention.

Dissect a pumpkin – Cut open the pumpkin but before you do get the kids making predictions about what the pumpkin inside is like:

I used this handout for the questions below for my preschooler: here.

How many seeds are inside it?

Will it be full or hollow?

How much does the pumpkin weigh?

Will it float or will it sink?  We did that last year and my son forgot so I’m glad we did it again.  Here’s a cute fun printable to graph what others think click here.

Then have them touch it, observe it, smell it…

Label the parts of the pumpkin

For this activity we incorporated art.  Cut a circle in the middle of a paper plate then have your kids glue it to a piece of paper.  Have them paint it and once it dries have them glue the fibrous strands and seeds.  Finally, they’ll end with labeling it.  I just wrote the parts of the pumpkin on the board and had them copy it onto paper then cut it and paste it.

Pumpkin Investigation – With this activity, we checked out books from the library and they had to investigate how a pumpkin grows.  They read a few books and just flipped through others, than they worked on this worksheet that I found here for free: Pumpkin Life Cycle handout.  The Pumpkin Book by Gail Gibbons and Pumpkin Day were the most informative on how a pumpkin grows the other two were for fun reading.

Pumpkin graphing – Go here to get the free printable for graphing whether a pumpkin will sink or float. I also used these other fun free printables:

I used this Freebie Pumpkin Activities printable that I found, it has tons of different activities.