3 Fun Pumpkin Activities for K-2 - Susan Jones Teaching

These pumpkin activities are great fun for the months of October and November in kindergarten, first, and second grade! I also have a few freebies to share with you along with these ideas.

If you want to see all this information in video format, just click play below and you can see my YouTube video with the pumpkin ideas:

Let’s dive in!

Pumpkin Activity #1: Number Sense

Pumpkin patch number match! This is a simple activity to help students count and identify numbers within 20. Here students will simply count up the pumpkin seeds and match them to the correct number pumpkin.

This is great to throw into a K/1 center for students to practice number sense independently. I also like that in the recording sheet, students will have to write the number word on the lines! You can grab that freebie in my store by clicking the image below:

Pumpkin Activity #2: Missing Addends

This is another one and it is called “pumpkin pickin’.” Here students will work on ways to make 10 and identifying the missing addends. Below you can see a picture of the recording sheet I have in my Pumpkin Math seasonal math centers over on TPT.

To play this, I put number cards 1-10 inside those pumpkin baskets above (they could just go in a bag). Students would pick out a number and using the pumpkin board on the right, they would show that many pumpkins using counters. In the above example, it is 5. They would have to count up the missing pumpkins to find the missing addend (5 + ? = 10). When they found the answer, they would use the recording sheet to show their answer! Students would repeat until all 10 numbers had been pulled and shown.

Pumpkin Activity #3: Use Pumpkin Books!

Here I actually have two different activities to go along with some pumpkin-themed books. They are both free ideas!

First, I like to read the book, How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin? by Margaret McNamara. In this book, the students carve pumpkins and group the seeds by 2s, 5s, and 10s to see which pumpkin had the most seeds. After reading, I do a simple activity like shown below.

I would use little buckets and fill them with manipulatives like foam cubes, connecting cubes, buttons, etc. I would also throw in a pumpkin number with either a 2, 5, or 10 on it. Students would work with a partner and when they get to their bucket they would have to first group the items by either 2s, 5s, or 10s (based on the pumpkin number inside). Then skip count to determine the total amount.

When finished, I had students rotate to different buckets! After a few rounds, we talked about which skip counting strategy was the quickest and which buckets had the most in them.

Another pumpkin-themed book I love to read is Spookley the Square Pumpkin by Joe Troiano!

After we read this book, I like to have students practice using adjectives as a class to describe Spookley. In this story, Spookley is unique because he is not round like the other pumpkins, but he is square. As a writing extension, I like to have students share some ways they are unique and special. I made a free writing sheet to go along with the story! To grab that, just click below: