I wanted to share this Five Little Pumpkins Halloween craft I did with my older daughter last year. It is based on the 5 Little Pumpkins rhyme. It’s very simple, we were able to complete it during baby’s nap time. Most importantly, it helps promote empathy and emotional intelligence as well as being educational.
Five Little Pumpkins Sitting on the Gate
Do you and your kid know the rhyme about the 5 Little Pumpkins? It goes like this:
5 Little Pumpkins sitting on a gate
The first one says “oh my it’s getting late”
The second one says “there are witches in the air”
The third one says “but we don’t care”
The fourth one says “let’s run and run and run”
The fifth one says “I’m ready for some fun!”
OOoooh went the wind
And OUT! (clap loudly here) went the light
And the five little pumpkins rolled out of sight
It’s a really fun rhyme and you can discuss what each pumpkin is thinking or feeling even before starting the activity.
Five Little Pumpkins Halloween Craft Supplies
The art and craft portion of this activity is making a picture of the 5 little monkeys on the gate. This is probably most appropriate for preschool aged kids, but toddlers can definitely do it too with a little help from a parent. You can do this any number of ways, but here are the materials we used for ours:
- Construction paper in dark blue, brown, white and yellow colours
- Assorted halloween stickers. Make sure you have at least one sticker of a witch.
- Scissors
- Sharpie
- Glue
- Pumpkin stamper (optional)
- Circle cutter (optional)
- Googly eyes (optional)
Cut (or let your preschooler do it with kid scissors) straight strips of the brown construction paper and glue to the dark blue paper as the fence and gate.
Cut out 5 orange pumpkins. I used a pumpkin stamp on white construction paper and used a circle cutter to cut them out. But you can just cut pumpkin shapes out of orange construction paper.
Glue the 5 little pumpkins to be sitting on top of the brown fence and gate.
Emotional intelligence and empathy
Now comes the emotional intelligence and empathy education.
Go through the rhyme with your kiddo and discuss what each of the pumpkins in the rhyme is feeling. Is the first pumpkin worried? Is the fifth pumpkin excited? There could be different emotions associated with each pumpkin.
Try saying the words for each pumpkin in different voices (scared vs. excited for example) and see if your child can spot the difference. You might have a different take on the five little pumpkins’ feelings from your child, and that’s ok. My daughter and I actually each made a picture that represents what we thought.
Some of the feelings we settled on for the pumpkins were: worried, scared, bored, excited, happy.
Next, discuss what kind of facial experession someone might make when they feel a certain way. Mimic the face for your child and ask them to make a scared or sad or happy face. Talk about the specific parts of a face – what does the mouth do when someone is sad? What do the eyes do when someone is excited? What do the eyebrows do when someone is mad? You can even make faces in front of a mirror with your child.
The next step is to draw the faces on the pumpkins in your five little pumpkins halloween craft. Use simple features: eyes, mouth, eyebrows. Eyebrows are pretty important in this case because they are such an expressive part of our faces.
Set the scene
Finally, once the pumpkin faces are done, let your kiddo decorate the rest of the picture with the halloween stickers. Put some trick or treaters walking by the fence. Put some witches flying in the sky. Make sure you cut out a moon or put a moon sticker (or three) in the night sky.
Your dark halloween night can be as busy or quiet as you want it to be (yet another reason for everyone to make their own five little pumpkins halloween craft!)
When you’re all finished, make sure to walk through the rhyme again and act out each of the pumpkins feelings based on their facial expression. This is a great craft to do as a family too (where each person does their own) because you can also draw attention to the similarities and differences in people’s “sad” or “happy” or “worried” faces and voices. Dad’s sad face might look different from mom’s, so how do we know what they’re feeling? We even wrote in little speech bubbles with each pumpkin’s words.
And voila!
Further steps
This was a really fun craft to do. We obviously used more craft supplies than was necessary with the googly eyes and stamps. But it can really be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be.
- You can make the whole thing a drawn picture that you pencil draw and colour in with your kiddo.
- You can free-hand cut the fence like I did, or you can take the opportunity to use a ruler to measure and draw straight lines and learn some math!
Want more?
Check out this density tower activity with everyday liquids, perfect for preschoolers.
This is a great art and craft project to make your own holiday cards with your kiddos.
Leave a Reply