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October 3, 2016

Five Little Pumpkins Counting By Fives

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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.
This Five Little Pumpkins counting by fives activity is perfect for the popular Halloween children's book.

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

Make fingerprints to go along with this five little pumpkins counting by fives activity.

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.

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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.

Five Little Pumpkins Counting By Fives Activity

Finally, it’s time to count and play!  Have your child count each group of five pumpkins to count by fives.  If they created their fingerprints all over the page instead of in groups of five, ask them to circle the fingerprints into groups of five.  They can then count the circles to count by five.

Have fun with this Five Little Pumpkins counting by fives activity this fall!

Here are more ways to learn and play with a pumpkin theme:

  • Pumpkin Pie Play Dough
  • Pumpkin Investigations Science Activity
  • Pumpkin Face Paper Plate Puppets
  • Pumpkin Themed Play Date for Kids
  • Pumpkin Patch Sight Word Activity
  • Glitter Pumpkin Suncatchers
  • Pumpkin Number Matching Busy Bag

Create fingerpirnt pumpkins to go along with this Five Little Pumpkins counting by Fives activity for Halloween.

About Colleen SugarAunts

Colleen Beck, OTR/L is an occupational therapist with 20 years experience, graduating from the University of Pittsburgh in 2000. Colleen owns and authors www.theottoolbox.com, where she inspires therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Colleen is passionate about play and strives to empower those serving kids of all levels and needs.

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