Pumpkin Day!

6 days to go...

Here's a great activity that can go along with almost any Halloween story but we did it along with, It's Pumpkin Day Mouse! by Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond (author and illustrator of our other favs - If You Give A Mouse A Cookie and If You Give A Moose A Muffin).  This is a very simple and fun story with great illustrations.  Mouse has seven pumpkins to decorate and he does a great job!  The story explores feelings & how we draw them (or make faces): happy, sad, silly, surprised, SCARY!!, and (a sweet ending) friendly.  There are also opportunities to practice counting and color names!  Feelings, counting and colors are great language concepts to address with your little one!  Make faces that match the ones of the pumpkins in the story and for older children, ask them to name a time or situation in which they have felt that way.  Count the pumpkins (and notice when one is missing) and label the paint colors.  This story doesn't make mention of Halloween so it's a great read even after the 31st.

We expanded on color and feeling concepts in our pumpkin craft activity.  Here's what you'll need:

paper plate
green paper (for a stem)
white and black paper (to draw and cut out pumpkin features)
red paint
yellow paint

We talked about what colors make orange - red and yellow of course!  I put a squirt of each color on a paper and let the boys mix it together.  They started off using their paint brushes and then got their hands in it!  We kept adjusting the color until we got the perfect "pumpkin orange."  The boys rubbed the paint to cover the entire plate.  Michael especially loved rubbing his hands through the paint and mixing it together. 

Once the paint dried, we looked through the book to decide which pumpkin each of my boys wanted to make.  Buddy chose the scary pumpkin, Michael chose the sad pumpkin, and Mighty pointed to the happy pumpkin.  We talked about what features each pumpkin would need (turned down mouth, angry, slanted eyebrows, etc.)  This gave a great opportunity for the boys to notice what makes a face portray a certain feeling and also to reference a book.  I drew and cut out the features and gave them to the boys to glue on their paper plate pumpkin. 

The pumpkins came out really cute!  AND we hit on a lot of great language!  Hope you try this one with your little ones!


Love, Language & Pumpkins,

Marisa