Easy Pumpkin Crafts for Kids

Pumpkins are such a fun and easy shape to use for all sorts of craft projects. Even little kids can make super cute crafts with pumpkins like these.

For the littlest kids, this mess-free pumpkin painting project from Teaching 2 and 3 Year Olds is a great one. The post includes a printable pumpkin shape you can use to make the project.

This paper strip pumpkin is one of the easiest for little kids to make and gives them a chance to practice their gluing skills. Get the DIY from Color the Moon.

A suncatcher is another easy one for little kids because it looks great almost no matter how you do it. Get the instructions from Fantastic Fun and Learning.

Painting with baking soda is a fun STEAM craft that makes a cool effect. You can find all the details at Inspiration Laboratories.

Using paper strips to make a pumpkin (or an apple if you make it with red paper) is a classic quick and easy craft. You can make this a Thanksgiving craft instead of a Halloween craft by adding things the kids are thankful for to the strips. This idea is from One Little Project. They’ve also got a good post about making yarn pumpkins, which also could be apples if you use red yarn, or you can just make yarn balls in any color you like (add an LED candle to make a super cute lantern).

Speaking of paper pumpkins, another fun three-dimensional paper pumpkin project is this one from Frugal Fun for Boys and Girls. Use plain orange paper, Halloween themed scrapbook paper, or let kids draw on whatever paper you use to make these fun little pumpkins.

Get out your felt and make these little jack o’lantern softies, which can be made no sew as Sunny Day Family shows them, or you can let kids practice their sewing skills on this simple shape.

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?

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