5 Little Pumpkins Activity

For my daughter's preschool class I had the opportunity today to do a read aloud with the kids. I was so excited to do this since read aloud time was my favorite time of day with my 3rd grade students and I love reading to Lily. I should be a librarian or something. Just so I can do story time :)

I debated what book to read. Since they are only 3 I decided simple was best. I wanted to read Piggie Pie by Margie Palatini to them so badly since I can do that one really well with awesome expression. Lily loves it, but I decided maybe next year I can sign up and do that story then when the kids are 4 and 5 and have longer attention spans. This year I decided to do Five Little Pumpkins by Dan Yaccarino.

Lily and I prepared for the story time together.  We had a lot of fun together doing it. This is something you can easily do with your children at home too!

You will need the book  Five Little Pumpkins by Dan Yaccarino., a permanent black marker, and 5 small pumpkins (I got mine at Walmart for like $2 for a bag of 5 pumpkins). The bag of pumpkin marshmallows was going the treat to share with her class. Lily was so excited to eat them!

First we read the book a couple times together singing the song together while we read it. We would hold up our fingers for which number of pumpkin we were talking about. Then we got the pumpkins out and put their ordinal numbers on them: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th.

Next we went through the pictures one at a time and drew a face on the pumpkin matching the picture. It shows all the pumpkins at the front but they aren't in order so you have to figure out which face is which. It might be easier to draw the faces first and then put the ordinal number on the back after. But Lily was really good at matching the face with the number. We talked about emotions (Is he worried? Scared? Excited? Happy?) and shapes (Oh this one has triangle eyes, this one has circle eyes, this one has diamond eyes, etc.) to help match the correct pumpkin with the ordinal number. I am no artist but Lily could still tell which faces matched.

Our 5 Little Pumpkins Sitting On A Gate :)

Here I am right before going in to read and sing with a bunch of 3 year olds!

Today with the preschool class I first talked to the students about how they were going to get to go to the pumpkin patch for their field trip next week and choose their very own pumpkin. I lined up all the little pumpkins on this table next to me and with Lily by my side we read the book and sang the song with some actions we made up with the kids. Then I had students come up to help hold the pumpkins and we sang it a few more times making sure all the students got at least 1 turn. Then Lily passed out her treats of the pumpkin marshmallows. We also brought the pumpkin shaped Reese's and the teachers were happy to have one of those too! It turned out really fun!

Here is a link to a video of the book with the music/song here!

My little helper :)

For more fun Halloween and Fall books to read to your kids baby to 3rd grade read this post here.

Thanks for reading!