Easy No Carve Pumpkin Decorating Ideas for Kids

With Halloween right around the corner as I write this, you might be looking for some ways to decorate pumpkins for kids without carving. Whether you’re doing this as a classroom or at home, there are a lot of fun ways to decorate pumpkins that don’t require sharp instruments.

Painting: A couple of years ago my daughter decided she wanted to paint a scene on our pumpkin instead of carving. She’s a teen and legitimately an artist, so it turned out beautiful, but kids of any age and artistic skill level can paint a pumpkin (and we definitely have had some more chaotic versions over the years). If you’re looking for some specific ideas on painting pumpkins, this post from Parents has a view good ideas. I love the emojis and the mini pumpkins painted as doughnuts, shown above.

Add Accessories: Easy Peasy and Fun has a great collection of (mostly) simple painted pumpkins that are embellished in different ways to make them a little more fun. I love this little bat, which only requires painting the pumpkin black and adding embellishments made with construction paper.

Drawing: If you don’t want to get out the paint, using markers (or paint pens, or oil pastels) to draw on a pumpkin can also be a lot of fun. This is especially effective on a light-colored pumpkin. (The photo above is from Casolia, by the way.)

Stickers: It’s almost universal that kids love sticking stickers to things, so why not give them a pumpkin and whatever stickers you have lying around (seasonally appropriate ones or eyes would be great, but not essential) and let them go to town.

Googly eyes: Speaking of eyes, if you’ve got a supply of peel and stick googly eyes (or the patience to use glue), adding eyes to a pumpkin is a fun and easy way to make a pumpkin spooky with very little work. This version comes from She Wears Many Hats.

You can also combine any of these ideas, so start with painting, then add stickers and/or eyes and just keep building from there. Maybe throw in some feathers and your pumpkin will be all set for Thanksgiving, too.

How do you like to decorate pumpkins with kids? I’d love to hear your ideas!

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

Leave a Reply