22 Pumpkin Activities for Kids at School

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Nothing says fall quite like a pumpkin! This beloved orange gourd shines as decor, dessert, and jack-o’-lantern art. But how can you bring Halloween’s favorite squash into the classroom? 

Think beyond pumpkin patch field trips and festive bulletin boards — pumpkins can be powerful tools for learning. Add these pumpkin activities to your STEM, ELA, math, and art lessons to spark creativity and engaging learning. 

Get your class pumped for pumpkin worksheets

Preschoolers love pumpkins, so latch on to that excitement with pumpkin activities for 3-year-old and 4-year-old preschool classes, UPK rooms, and even fall Kindergarten lessons. Whether it’s worksheets or center activities, pumpkin activities for preschool bring fun and discovery into the classroom.

Preschool Pumpkin Activities & Crafts | Pumpkin Worksheets, Centers & Fine Motor
By Planning Playtime
Grades: PreK-K

This preschool power pack includes 15 worksheets and 16 activity centers covering letter matching, counting, shapes, and crafting. The activities and centers work for morning tubs and groups. The worksheets can be easily printed for a sub day. 

Stand out with a Spookley the Square Pumpkin reading companion

Spookley the Square Pumpkin brings seasonal excitement to your literacy block. With a reading comprehension unit built around this children’s book, you can meet CCSS in Reading Literature while keeping lessons festive and engaging.

Spookley The Square Pumpkin – Reading Comprehension Lessons & Activities
By Kindergarten Smorgasboard
Grades: PreK-1
Standards: CCSSRL.K.1, RL.K.2, RL.K.3

Packed with resources, this bundle covers essential comprehension skills, including predictions, story mapping, retelling, character traits, and sequencing. You’ll also find art project directions, writing prompts, rubrics, record sheets, and ready-to-use comprehension questions.

Encourage ELA engagement with pumpkin activities

Fall activities for kids go beyond just science and STEM. Pumpkins fit right into ELA passages, too. You might use this as part of a small group or as a bell ringer. 

Using Context Clues: Pumpkins
By Hello Fifth
Grades: 3rd-6th

Help students strengthen close reading skills with a pumpkin-themed passage focused on context clues. The activity includes an answer key and context-based questions to support instruction.

Get creative with pumpkin coloring activities

With roll-and-color activities, students combine play and practice. Each dice roll helps them work on number recognition and following instructions, making pumpkin activities for kindergarten a great fit for centers or small group learning.

Roll and Draw Free Halloween Coloring Craft Visual Perceptual Skills Activities
By CreativeCOTA LLC
Grades: K-1st
Standards: CCSSK.CC.A.3; K.CC.B.4, B.4a

This free eight-page PDF resource includes easy-to-follow directions for the roll-and-draw pumpkin activity, plus a color-by-number page. The use of fine motor skills and visual perception makes it perfect for special education and occupational therapy classes. 

Fall in love with pumpkin art

Students will love this creative pumpkin activity, whether as a fall art project or a fun brain break. 

Yayoi Kusama Dot Pumpkins: Fall Art Lesson with Infinity Nets & Timeline
By Expressive Monkey-The Art Teacher’s Little Helper
Grades: 2nd-5th

Make every day of October exciting with this 30-page bundle. Teachers get instructions, drawing guides, templates, print-and-go activities, coloring samples, and pages, plus different levels to keep every student engaged and challenged.

Solve a pumpkin-themed escape room

Give math a fresh twist with this rounding activity where students “round their way to escape.” This math escape room works well as an end-of-chapter challenge or a fun Friday math game.

4th Grade Place Value & Rounding Digital Escape Room Fall/Pumpkin Themed
By The Great Classroom Escape
Grades: 3rd-5th
Standards: CCSS 4.NBT.A.1, A.2, A.3

Unlock the fun with a quick start guide, detailed instructions, tips, Google Form access, a printable case file, and a handy QR code for fast and easy use. The puzzles focus on rounding, recognizing place value, and solving rounding challenges. 

Turn pumpkin activities into a STEM-tacular celebration

Halloween, pumpkins, and STEM — oh my! While pumpkins may bring to mind jack-o’-lanterns and scary fun, they also open the door to hands-on engineering and problem-solving activities with pumpkin STEM activities.

Halloween STEM Challenges & Activities (October) Pumpkin Catapult, Candy Towers
By Brooke Brown – Teach Outside the Box
Grades: K-5th

Take STEM to the next level this fall with three fun challenges: pumpkin catapult, candy tower, and spiderweb bridge. Each activity comes with lesson plans, slides, student instructions, rubrics, and supply lists.

Explore the science of pumpkins

Pumpkins may light up your classroom windows, but their real magic lies in biology. Use NGSS plant observation standards to guide students as they explore the science of what makes a pumpkin a pumpkin.

Autumn or Fall Science Activities | Pumpkins DIGITAL Flipbook Google™ Slides
By Jewel’s School Gems
Grades: 2nd-5th

Using Google Slides and a pumpkin flipbook, students explore the parts, storage, and growth of a pumpkin. They can also define the different parts of a pumpkin and write a description using digital notes. 

Dive into a pumpkin’s life cycle

The life cycle is a core concept in elementary science, and fall offers an opportunity to explore it through pumpkins. From growth to decay, pumpkins offer a hands-on way to study how living things change over time. You can build an entire October science curriculum around the life of a pumpkin.

Pumpkin Life Cycle Unit
By forkin4th
Grades: 1st-4th
Standards: CCSS.RI.K.7, RI.1.7, RI.2.7, RI.3.7, RI.4.3 

This comprehensive bundle includes science notes, vocabulary cards, graphic organizers, diagrams, flow maps, and engaging activities. With 27 pages of resources, it works perfectly as a cross-curricular activity for both science and ELA.

Spark interest in the scientific method

Need a pumpkin activity that works for science centers or inquiry-based learning? This week-long exploration of gourds offers hands-on discovery and engaging science investigation.

Experimenting w/ PUMPKINS! A Science Unit Exploring the Pumpkin
By Mr Mault’s Marketplace
Grades: 3rd-6th
Standards: NGSS 3-5-ETS1-1, 1-2, 1-3

The bundle includes daily activities, data tables, analysis pages, and measurement exercises. Adaptable for all learner levels, it connects to the scientific method by guiding students through predictions, hypothesizing, and data collection.

Carve up a little creepiness 

Combine the fun of pumpkin carving with hands-on learning about exothermic reactions. Students explore catalysts and scientific theories through an engaging Halloween-themed activity.

Pumpkin Ooze Challenge
By The Joie Lab
Grades: Not Grade Specific

Designed to be a 45-minute activity, this resource includes a four-page PDF file. It provides everything teachers need to understand and complete the experiment. 

Spin your way into fall 

Fun Friday games need a spinner to get things moving! Instead of starting with a ready-made game, have students create their own pumpkin spinners and brainstorm games they can play with them.

Clip Art~ Pumpkin Spinners for Fall and Halloween
By Cara’s Creative Playground
Grades: Not Grade Specific

This seven-page PDF project includes 16 color and line art spinner graphic sheets with one to eight spaces. Created as vector files, the images can be enlarged to any size and printed multiple times without losing quality.

Try simple pumpkin activities for low-prep fun

Pumpkin activities for kids don’t have to take much time. Try a quick and fun activity when you have a little downtime in your classroom. These ideas can be easily built into sub plans.

• Pumpkin-themed scavenger hunt
• Paper plate pumpkin art
• Tissue paper pumpkin art
• Cut potato pumpkin stamping
• Pumpkin seed counting
• Marble paint pumpkins
• Pumpkin poems
• Jack-o’-lantern collage art
• Alphabet pumpkin matching
• Playdough pumpkins

Discover pumpkin fun with TPT activities

Fall learning can be fun and rigorous! Bring some pumpkin spice into your math, ELA, STEM, and art lessons with elementary activities with pumpkins. Once completed, you can use these projects as decorations or a bulletin board installation. Or, send them home with students, so they can continue the pumpkin fun at home.