Pumpkin STEM Activities for Kids

Last month I shared some fun apple STEM activities, but of course you can do a lot of the same things with our other favorite fall produce: the pumpkin. Here are some fun pumpkin STEM ideas for use in the classroom or at home. (Also check out my pumpkin printables post; it has some ideas for learning about parts of the pumpkin, measuring pumpkins and more.)

Lots of classic STEM activities can be performed with pumpkins, such as pumpkin catapults, using the pumpkin as the base (this one is from Preschool Powol Packets); pumpkin volcanoes (get this one from Natural Beach Living, food coloring optional but fun!); and sink or float experiments that turn into a full sensory experience, like this pumpkin boat project from Frugal Fun for Boys and Girls.

Check this post from Our Family Code for more projects involving exploding pumpkins (including doing the classic Mentos and Coke explosion in a pumpkin). And of course you can use that pumpkin catapult to launch pumpkin candies if you want. Get details on that idea from Team Cartwright. (Theirs just uses craft sticks but you could use the pumpkin version for this purpose as well.)

Have you ever thought of growing pumpkins in a pumpkin? I have to say I hadn’t but you can learn all about how to do it at home or in the classroom at Life with Moore Babies. This is a different take on the traditional pumpkin decay experiment with Pumpkin Jack (get the details from Little Bins for Little Hands).

Or you can take traditional STEM activities and give them a pumpkin themed twist even if you’re not using actual pumpkins. Like making pumpkin poppers with orange cups and balloons (get all the details from Gift of Curiosity) or pumpkin lava lamps, which you can find on Science Sparks.

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Apple Sensory Play Ideas

With summer coming soon in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a fun time to incorporate activities and crafts with a sunny theme. Take some time to learn about the sun (this post from National Geographic Kids is a good one) and then do some sun activities.

Sun prints are a classic summer activity, and there are lots of ways to do them, from placing objects on construction paper (like in this craft from MomBrite) or by using sun print paper (aka cyanotype paper).

Practice threading, counting, color sorting and other skills with this easy sun threading activity from Taming Little Monsters.

Lessons 4 Little Ones has a great blog post full of ideas for science experiments using the sun, such as melting crayons, looking at shadows, making a sun dial and trying a solar oven. Printables to go with the lessons are available for purchase or you can just talk through the students’ hypotheses about what will happen and draw or otherwise record the results.

This updraft tower from Almost Unschoolers is a cool way to illustrate that the heat of the sun causes an updraft, which makes the pinwheel spin. This is a good one to do inside near a sunny window so you don’t have wind spinning the pinwheel instead.

You’ll want to get out in the sun to try this experiment form Life with Moore Babies to see what kinds of things the sun can melt. Using different kinds of sweets you can see how the sun melts things by itself and how you can concentrate the power of the sun with a magnifying glass.

Playing with shadows is fun for kids of all ages, and you can track a shadow through the day with this experiment from Science Sparks. If you’re working with multiple kids they can each choose an object to shadow (ha!) and at the end of the day you can see how different their shadows looked.

And of course you’ll want to make a sun themed suncatcher craft, right? This one from Fox Farm Home uses all the pretty flowers you collect on your nature walk and puts them in a sun-shaped frame.

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