Five Little Pumpkins Counting By Fives

You know the book, Five Little Pumpkins, right? It’s a Halloween favorite in many preschools and early elementary school classrooms and libraries this time of year. We decided to take our love for the pumpkin book and create our own Five Little Pumpkins counting by fives math activity.

This was a fun fingerprint painting craft with a math spin that was fun for all of my kids, from preschool on up through elementary-aged. Try this creative painting and math activity this season while reading the book with a class or a group in a playdate setting. It’s sure to be a hit, times 5!

Looking for more pumpkin related activities? Try these fun pumpkin activities.

Five Little Pumpkin Book activity

This book and activity is perfect for this time of year. Grab the book, read it to the kids, and then start creating with a hands-on math art five little pumpkins counting by five activity. It is a fun way to practice counting by fives and the kids will be sure to remember their pumpkins the next time they are counting by fives in math class!

You’ll need just a few materials for this project:

Orange paint
White paper
Black fine tip marker
Brown and green markers

To start, open the orange paint and start fingerprinting. Try to have your child press their fingerprints into groups of five. This is a good time to practice counting 1-5 with younger kids. If your child would rather just press their finger prints all over the page, that is fine too. We can make it work for the math portion of this activity.

Let the orange fingerprints dry. This should only take about an hour depending on how thick the paint went on the paper. You may need to let the paint dry overnight in some cases.

Hands on Pumpkin Math

Next, show your child how to use the fine tip marker to add features to each finger print to create pumpkin faces. This is a fun and creative part of this activity and my kids really had a ball with it. We made pumpkins that were happy, sad, mad, and surprised. Talk about emotions while you are creating the pumpkins faces with your child. If you are looking for another way to explore emotions with a pumpkin theme, try this activity.

Add other features to the pumpkins too, like triangle eyes, square mouth, lines, rectangles, or any shape. Talking about shapes and drawing different forms is a great way to combine math concepts. Kids will also work on visual motor skills as they work to draw the small forms inside the pumpkin finger print.

At this point, the child can use the green and brown markers to create stems and leaves for each pumpkin.