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5 Little Pumpkins

5 Little Pumpkins

Have you heard the poem about the five little pumpkins? It's been around forever and goes like this:

Five little pumpkins sitting on a gate,

The first one said, "Oh, my, it's getting late."

The second one said, "There are witches in the air."

The third one said, "But we don't care."

The fourth one said, "Let's run and run and run!"The fifth one said, "I'm ready for some fun."

Oooooooo went the wind and out went the light.

And the five little pumpkins rolled out of sight.

There are different versions of this in books and online, but this is the one in the book we have, which has illustrations by Dan Yaccarino. After reading this to my three-year-old son and his four-year-old buddy, we got to work making our own artwork of the five little pumpkins sitting on the gate.

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Materials you'll need

Step-by-step tutorial

Step 1
After reading the story, we looked at the illustration of the five pumpkins sitting on the gate. Because I was working with preschoolers, I precut my green paper to look like the grass-covered hills in the illustration.

Step 2
The kids glued the green hills to the dark blue paper, with some help from me on getting it placed just right.

Step 3
First, they placed their craft sticks on the paper to look like a gate or fence and glued them down. (They needed some help with this.) I reinforced the craft sticks with a glue gun, as the sticks had a tendency to pop off the paper. I also gave my preschoolers a pile of jack-o'-lantern stickers and had them count out five for their artwork (and to get a little counting practice in).

Step 4
The kids stuck their jack-o'-lanterns onto the popsicle stick gates. They chose the other Halloween-themed stickers they wanted to use. We continued to refer to the illustration in the book, noticing a witch, a ghost, a spooky house, and the moon.

Step 5
The kids got in some great fine motor practice, as they peeled off the sticker's backing and stuck the stickers on the craft sticks.

Final result!
Here's one of the final products. We read the poem again and this time the kids pointed to their pumpkins and the other stickers for each part of the story. Happy Halloween!