Colorful No-Carve Owl Pumpkins

We typically carve jack-o-lanterns every year as a Halloween tradition in our family but it's always a bummer that we have to wait until just before Halloween for the activity to avoid them spoiling on the front porch. A great alternative that can be enjoyed all month long is no-carve pumpkins. We have been on an owl kick this week and created these colorful no-carve owl pumpkins. Their black color makes them perfect for decorating for Halloween and the pop of color from the liquid chalk and tissue paper make them stunning!

Sponge Painted Jack-o-Lantern Craft

Can you believe Halloween is only a few weeks away? We have already shared lots of great Halloween crafts but we have a few more we are excited to share like this Sponge Painted Jack-o-Lantern. It is super simple to make, only 3 steps, and it's a fun craft that gives kids an opportunity to create a truly unique piece of artwork. It is also a perfect preschool craft for learning about triangles.

Preschool Pumpkin Lacing Activity with Printable

Counting and recognizing the teen numbers can be a bit tricky for a preschooler. I've been working with my preschooler on mastering those numbers lately and decided to put together this preschool pumpkin lacing activity as a fun way for her to practice them. It's perfect for fall and Halloween and not only does the activity help preschoolers practice counting and recognizing numbers 1 to 20, but it's fantastic for fine motor skills. I've included both a numbered and blank version of the printable so you can customize it however you choose.  We've also made a heart lacing printable in the past you might enjoy.   

Melted Plastic Cup Pumpkins

My daughter's preschool teacher recently made melted plastic cup apples with my daughter's class. I have since decided they are the coolest thing ever! My 4 year old raved about how amazing it was to watch the cup melt in the oven so quickly and I have been eager to experience this awesomeness for myself... So when I found orange plastic cups at the store you better bet I was all over creating melted pumpkins to be just as cool as my daughter's preschool teacher (wink!).

Pumpkin Patch Art

One of my favorite crafts I look forward to this time of year with my kids is making Pumpkin Patch Art. It's become a yearly tradition, along with our Apple and Fall Tree crafts. I felt like I had to get really creative this year because it's our fourth year making pumpkin patch art, but we had a lot of fun coming up with something new and fun!

Pumpkin Cutting Practice Jack-o-Lantern Craft

I set my daughter up with a scissor practice tray cutting up orange straws the other day. She loves doing this! Plus I thought the orange color coincided perfectly with Fall time and Halloween! Little did she know I had big plans for those cut up straws to be repurposed into a fun Pumpkin Jack-o-Lantern Craft. Today I'm sharing with you how to turn a cutting practice activity into a fun textured Pumpkin Craft for Halloween.

Circle Stamped Pumpkins

We made our last pumpkin craft of the season today after reading one of my favorite Halloween books, Big Pumpkin by Erica Silverman. My preschooler has been practicing drawing circles so we played off of that when making this craft.

I cut pumpkins out of orange cardstock paper and my daughter used an empty toilet paper tube dipped in orange paint to stamp circles all over her pumpkin.

 

After our pumpkins were completely dry, we glued them onto a green background and glued a brown stem on them. Here is the design I made on my pumpkin below.

  I definitely prefer my daughter's though! It's just so cute!!  

  I hope you've enjoyed all of our pumpkin crafts and activities lately.  :)  

Shaving Cream Painted Paper Pumpkins

 

I don't have many decorations for Halloween so I decided it would be fun to make something with my toddler that we could put on display for Fall. I've had these darling paper pumpkins pinned from Delia Creates on Pinterest for a couple months and thought they would be perfect!

 

Delia painted her paper strips by marble painting, but I wanted a different texture so we decided to use the shaving cream method for painting our paper strips. I made all of our strips 1 inch and we used two different colors of orange in our shaving cream. We ended up using 10 strips for each pumpkin but I wish we would have used 11 to close the gaps in a tiny bit more. I always love the beautiful texture shaving cream painting creates!

 

 

You can visit Delia Creates to see her picture tutorial of how she put her pumpkins together. I did mine a little bit different. After punching the holes in both sides, I put a brad in one end of the strips and secured it shut. Then I fanned my strips out like pictured below.

 

Then I turned it over and folded the strips up one at a time while inserting the strip into another brad. Once all the strips were in the brad, I secured it closed.

 

I loosened up the brad a little on the top to help secure the pipe cleaner stem on top and then we secured the green vine to the stem.

 

Easy peasy and oh so cute!!

I am loving how they look up on our living room mantle. So festive for Fall and Halloween!

 

 

Did you create a Pinterest-inspired project this month? Stop by tomorrow to link it up to the Pinterest Challenge. It will run all week long! Hope to see you there!

Pumpkin Guts Sensory Play

We are continuing our pumpkin/fall theme this week in preschool and are learning about the life cycle of a pumpkin. The perfect book to go along with this theme is Pumpkin Jack by Will Hubbell (affiliate link). It is a cute book about a boy who in the course of one year, watches as his jack-o-lantern, Jack, decomposes, sprouts and finally produces more pumpkins in time for Fall. Since the weather isn't quite cold enough to carve pumpkins yet, we explored the inside of a pumpkin through sensory play with a Pumpkin Guts Sensory Bin.

Plumply, Dumply Pumpkin (Pumpkin Hunt and Sorting Activity)

 

Plumply, Dumply Pumpkin by Mary Serfozo was the perfect book to continue our pumpkin themed preschool activities this week. I found this idea from The Mailbox Magazine a couple years ago and was excited to revisit it again with my daughter.

 

Prior to reading the book, I cut out 10 round pumpkins and 10 lumpy pumpkins out of orange cardstock paper. I had a pattern from The Mailbox Magazine (Oct/Nov 2010 issue), but you could easily just draw out a pattern of a lumpy and round pumpkin yourself. I hid the pumpkins around my living room for her to find after we read the book.

 

After reading the book, I set my daughter loose on her pumpkin hunt in my living room.

 

After she found a pumpkin she put it in her purse. 

When she was done finding all of the pumpkins we got them out of her purse and counted them. Then I attached a round pumpkin and a lumpy pumpkin to the front of two tin buckets and my daughter sorted each pumpkin in the right container.

Such a fun preschool activity!!

 

I like to post pictures of our activities on Instagram so if you'd like some sneak peeks now and again and a glimpse our silly life, you can follow me HERE.

 

Washi Tape Patterned Pumpkins

My daughter loves washi tape. In fact, if I get it out and use it and don't involve her I usually deal with a palatial meltdown. With that in mind, and since I'm trying to justify the fact that I seem to order it every single time it's on Pick Your Plum, I figured what better way to learn about patterns than with washi tape. Right?!!

Pumpkin Pattern Worksheet (for Sensory Bin)

As promised, I have a Pumpkin Pattern Worksheet to go along with my Five Little Pumpkins Sensory Bin. It's tested and approved by my cute little girl.

Click HERE to get it in PDF version, or you can also get it in JPEG version HERE and just print it as a whole page.

*The pumpkin clipart used in the worksheet came from SweetClipart.com  

You can leave the pattern worksheet as a whole page or cut it in four different strips. We are just starting to learn about patterns so I didn't want her to get overwhelmed with looking at the whole page of different patterns so I cut mine into four different strips. It worked perfectly for her.  

As you can see I just set the sensory bin next to her so she could get out all pumpkins and vines by herself. We are just storing the 4 pattern strips in the pumpkin sensory bin so they'll be there for her to use whenever we get it out this week.

  In case you missed my Five Little Pumpkins Sensory Bin post, you can see it HERE.

  I will have more pumpkin pattern fun coming up this week so make sure to check back! :)  

Five Little Pumpkins Sensory Bin

We traded in our apple books for pumpkin books at the library this week so I switched out our Apple Sensory Bin for Five Little Pumpkins. My daughter could not wait to get her hands on it.

  {This post contains affiliate links, read our Disclosure Policy for more information.}

How we put together our bin:

We kept our black bean base that we already had in the bin from our Apple Tree theme last week, so that made the transition really simple.

To keep with the Five Little Pumpkins theme, I placed five little pumpkin containers on a gate or fence. I found my little pumpkins at Walmart, but here are some on Amazon that look the same. For the fence I used some of our wooden blocks.

 

I made a pumpkin patch in the remaining section of the bin using orange poms and green sparkly pipe cleaners.

 

Fold the ends of the pipe cleaners down so the sharp ends aren't exposed and curl them around your finger. I placed them around the bin as vines and put the poms around them. I chose to use 25 orange poms because as part of our play this week, I am going to challenge her to put 5 poms in every pumpkin bin to practice counting objects to 5. Add some tongs and a scoop and your little one is all ready to dig in.

 

 

Your little one  can practice moving the pumpkin poms into the bigger pumpkin containers.

They can use the scoop to practice filling the pumpkins with the black beans.

They can build a tall tower with their blocks to see how high they can get a pumpkin.

And smile and laugh when it all comes tumbling down.

Or you can work on patterns with the pumpkin poms and vines.

**Go HERE for our Pumpkin Pattern Printable**

  Pair this sensory bin with Five Little Pumpkins by Iris Van Rynback .

It's a pretty popular Halloween story that is the well-known Five Little Pumpkins rhyming finger play in story version.

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