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Are you looking for a fun thematic unit idea for fall? Pumpkins are always a hit! Check out this post with my favorite pumpkin activities for kindergarten. Your students will love having some pumpkin fun during their literacy and math practice!
As Halloween approaches, here are many ways that you can bring some pumpkin fun to literacy practice in your classroom! Here are some of my favorites:
First, you can help students learn more about the pumpkin life cycle by reading nonfiction books together as a class.
After learning about and discussing how a pumpkin grows, students can put together their own pumpkin life cycle pop-up books!
They will be so excited to show off the new vocabulary they’ve learned as they share their books with their families.
A pumpkin glyph is another fun activity that you can do with your class!
Students will answer different questions about themselves, each answer corresponding to a different part of a jack-o-lantern face.
After creating their own pumpkin glyph, students will also write sentences for each of their answers.
The end result is a fun pumpkin glyph book with the pumpkin craft serving as the front cover.
For this activity, students will cut out the scrambled words of a sentence. Once they have figured out the correct word order, they will glue the words to the pumpkin.
This is a great way to incorporate fine motor practice during morning work or literacy centers!
Another fun pumpkin-themed literacy activity is this beginning sound sort! Students are given a page with two pumpkins on it.
After cutting out the pictures, students will say the word for each picture and listen for the beginning sound. They will then glue each picture onto the correct pumpkin. There are three different letter combinations that you can use to target specific sounds.
One of my favorite books to read during a pumpkin unit study is “The Biggest Pumpkin Ever” by Steven Kroll.
After reading this story together as a class, students can complete a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast the characters in the story.
Your class can also complete a writing activity to share what they would do if they had the biggest pumpkin ever. It’s always fun to see their clever sentences and illustrations!
You can also bring some pumpkin fun to math time in your kindergarten classroom! These pumpkin activities are great for morning work, math centers, small groups, or even whole-group math activities. Many of these math activities center around one pumpkin that you bring to the classroom.
Help your students explore the concept of circumference using your class pumpkin. This activity also helps students practice making predictions.
Students will cut a piece of yarn with their prediction for how big around the pumpkin measures. After using yarn to measure the actual circumference of the pumpkin, students will compare it to their own piece of yarn. Then they will write about whether their guess was too short, too long, or just right.
You can also use the data from this activity to help students practice graphing! Students can color in a graph with all of the prediction results from the class. There is also space on the graphing worksheet for students to tally and write about the data.
In addition to measuring the circumference, students can explore the weight of a pumpkin with this picture sort.
Students will sort a variety of pictures based on whether they are heavier or lighter than a pumpkin.
Your students will love exploring measurement with a pumpkin! Students will use printable pumpkins to measure themselves. After recording how many pumpkins tall they are, they will compare their height to other classmates. They can then fill out their recording sheet to take home.
Students can also use small paper pumpkins to measure classroom items.
After measuring a variety of items, students will write and illustrate sentences about the shortest and longest items they measured.
For even more practice with nonstandard measurement, students will measure several pumpkins using different classroom objects. They will record their predictions and results in a printable book.
Students can practice everything they’ve learned about measurement by completing the activities in this measurement book.
They will measure a class pumpkin with snap cubes, crayons, and paper clips.
Then they will document their predictions and the results on each page of the book.
On the final page, students will write and illustrate a sentence about the classroom pumpkin.
Your students can practice number sense with this pumpkin-themed ten frame activity.
Students will count the dots in each ten frame, then match the correct pumpkin. This is a great activity for morning work or math centers!
Another fun counting activity is to have your students count the seeds of the classroom pumpkin! Since there are many seeds in pumpkin, you can teach them how to make groups of ten to help them keep track as they count.
Students can color in their mats while you count and group the seeds in front of the class. Once you’ve finished counting, students can take home their own bag with some of the pumpkin seeds.
You can find all of the pumpkin activities mentioned above (and more!) in one easy-to-download resource! This set of pumpkin activities is perfect for putting together a fall thematic unit in your classroom. To save you even more time, this resource also includes a pumpkin unit at-a-glance PDF with a suggested sequence for using the activities as a thematic unit.
To take a closer look at everything included in this resource, you can find it in the A Spoonful of Learning shop or on TPT.
Be sure to save this post if you’d like to come back to it later! Just add the pin below to your favorite teaching board on Pinterest. You’ll be able to quickly find these fun pumpkin activities when you’re working on your fall lesson plans.
These alphabet books will have students dive deep into learning about each letter of the alphabet while eager to see what activity they get to complete next!
