Here at Crafty Mama’s Homeschool, it has been all pumpkins all the time.
We discovered lots of facts about the fall fruit, a member of the vine crop family cucurbits. There are many more pumpkin facts here and here is some interesting history about the Jack O’Lantern.
Don’t forget the recipes. We tried the Pumpkin Pudding, but the kids didn’t like it.
We also made Pumpkin Bars with Cream Cheese Frosting and Pumpkin Muffins, with raisins and walnuts. (The recipes are in this post.)
And what better use for pumpkin seeds than math manipulatives? Well, okay, toasting and eating is the best use.
Don’t want to carve pumpkins? You can make these cute little ones out of egg cartons. (Link opens a “how to” video clip from Family Fun Magazine’s website.)
Here are ours.
You simply cut the cups from an egg carton. Glue two cups together by running a bead of glue around the top of one cup and placing the other cup on top (inverted). When glue dries, paint orange. When paint dries, poke a hole in the top with a paper clip and insert a green curled pipe cleaner through the top. We also used brown for the stems. Have fun drawing faces on with a marker.
The kids got creatively inspired and decided to draw Jack O’Lantern faces on some orange ball pit balls and make really cute mobiles out of them. Being rambunctious little boys, the mobiles were knocked down before I could take a picture, but here is a surviving pumpkin face.
Just throw in some pumpkin literature and a pumpkin creative writing assignment and you’ve got a pretty pumpkin-y theme unit.
When Halloween is over, the learning can continue. Just leave the pumpkins outside in a safe place where you can observe them for the coming weeks and you have a great science opportunity!
