Learning with Pumpkins & Halloween Treat

For school this week in Kinder school we have had lots of fun with pumpkins. We’ve played with them, measured them, ate them, painted them…

Here are some fun ways to learn with pumpkins:

Describe them: (Language) This is a good way to get the kiddos to think beyond descriptive words like cool, fun… We observed pumpkins and came up with descriptive words to describe how our pumpkin looks, feels, taste and smells.

2. Measure them: (Math) We measured pumpkins using cubes and a ruler. My little man had to guesstimate how many cubes tall his pumpkin was. Then I would write it on the board so he could see the number, finally he would see if it was correct and if it wasn’t I would X out his guess. It took him 5 guesses to figure out it wasn’t 6 cubes high nor 30 cubes high. You can find all of our fun Pumpkin investigation activities with printable here.

3. Science fun: We watched a fun video on the cycle of a pumpkin which I’m now figuring out he likes documentary type of videos. The other day he asked me how honey was made so I found a video and he wanted to watch 10 of them. He then proceeded to tell me everything he learned using terms I’d never heard of before. I’m sure he’s forgotten all those big words but it was fun to watch him absorb it all.

4. Letter Fun: (Language) He practiced his letter recognition with this Pumpkin Letter Search activity. You can totally do this activity all fall long not just over Halloween. We printed off a sheet with all of the alphabet letters on it. There are tons of free ones online to choose from but here’s a free one. Then he would pull out a letter from the pumpkin, say the letter and then find it on his sheet. He loved it!

5. Observation and investigation: (Science) My little guy came up with a hypothesis on whether his pumpkin would sink or float. You can find the free printable here or here.

6. Painting -(art) For our art time we made pumpkin prints using an apple to go with the story we read. We also just drew and colored pumpkins. We read this cute story which I never read before but I highly recommend it. It’s called “Pumpkin Town” by Katie McKy, I love illustrations and the cute story.

7. Cooking fun (science, math, language) We like to cook and incorporate all of the stuff we are learning in in Spanish and English kinder class. For snack we had a healthy Halloween treat!

We made boo-nanas you can get the recipe here. I especially loved our Frankenjuice (the recipe is below).

8. Ghostbuster Stomp- (Math) This is not pumpkin but it did this during our Halloween week. We practiced our numbers with our Ghostbuster Stomp number activity. If you’re a kindergarten or preschool teacher you know that you constantly find yourself figuring out ways to review your lessons. What I do with his letters and numbers is I’ll incorporate a new number and letter each week but through each day we are constantly reviewing the old numbers and letters from the previous weeks. For this activity, I just taped a number at the end. Then I would call out a number and he would have to go out and stomp the ghost.

What more can a kid want from kindergarten! Now for the healthy Franken-juice recipe. It’s so healthy you can serve it for breakfast and so yummy it works as a great party appetizer!

Healthy Halloween Treats: Franken-Juice

ingredients for 6 small cups

1 banana
a large handful of spinach
4 fresh pineapple rings + 1/2 cup of the pineapple juice
2 cups of yogurt (I used 1 cup vanilla greek yogurt and 1 cup of plain greek yogurt)
1/2 an apple diced
8 large ice cubes

1. Place all of the above ingredients in blender and mix.