PUMPKINS

I really had great plans for learning and playing with pumpkins this year and we did get to some of it, but a lot had to be put on the agenda for next fall. Oh well, we had fun!

 Our first activity was to bake a pie pumpkin and use it to make pumpkin muffins. I got the recipe from my friend Tara's blog last year and these muffins are seriously delicious!!!

We cleaned out the pumpkin and baked it in the morning, then after nap time we made the muffins. 

The food processor was loud. =)

One morning I used our fun pumpkin ice cube tray from The Dollar Tree as her breakfast plate. She really enjoyed the mini waffles, chocolate chips, and dipping syrup!

I had really high hopes for this next activity I found HERE. I really should have known when she woke up from her nap a big bawling mess that our afternoon would be sketchy, but I wanted to press on and thought she might get into a better mood. She did have fun through some of it, but she was really not that interested. I'll bring this one out again next year and see what she thinks then!

The first thing we did was read THIS book to discuss our senses. I wanted to get her thinking about the different parts of our body so we could transfer that to putting the Mr. Potato Head pieces on the pumpkin. She really liked the book so I thought we were in for a good activity.

I had placed the pieces (not the actual potato) into a brown paper bag that I wanted her to explore. I had high hopes that she would be able to feel around and not look when I gave her a part we were looking for. No way! She wanted to dump the bag out and nothing else. Oh well! We went with it!!!

I made a paper plate thingie just like the blog I found this idea on. Only I didn't have a brad so we improvised again and rolled a marble to find the piece that we were supposed to put on our pumpkin. 

The potato head pieces would NOT go into the pumpkin on their own, so I had to use a knife to cut a little hole before I could push the piece in. 

Finished product. She was giving me a fake smile here because at this point she was really over the whole activity. 

This morning we did our final big pumpkin activity. Painting pumpkins!!! I don't know where I got the idea to use old baby food plastic containers for holding paint. It works great because they are super easy to clean out. The only downside is that you can't really get a lot of the paint back if you don't use it all.

We had a lot of fun exploring pumpkins this fall. Not everything went as planned, but I think we still made some fun memories!