1st Grade Pumpkin Ideas & a Freebie

I just love teaching the students about pumpkins in the month of October. I hope this post gives you some ideas for teaching about pumpkins in first grade. Click the images to check out the TpT sources and my free resources through Google Drive.

Before we even start learning about pumpkins, we complete a schema chart. The students tell me what they think they know about pumpkins. I write the thinkings down on post-its. As we learn, we move the posts-its to “Yes, We Were Right” or “Oops, We Were Wrong.” The students stop me and tell me when they learn something new about pumpkins, we place that on “Our New Learning.” The “Wonderings” section would be for questions they have like “Are pumpkins a fruit or vegetable?”

Our pumpkin learning usually lasts for about two weeks. I like to give the kids quick morning jobs when they come in. The pumpkin sheet below is from my Pumpkins Packet on TpT.

Since this is a short school week, we will be doing pumpkin themed literacy centers this week instead of phonics based ones.

They love rolling words to see which word “won.” The cubes pictured above is from KiddoCubes from TpT.

One of the centers we always do is Match it Rhyme it. This one is pumpkin themed.

Spin a Word has the students spinning a beginning sound and then an ending sound to build words. They record the words they spin on their recording sheets. The nonsense words go on the bottom of the sheet.

Another favorite of my students is Magnify Tiny Words. This one is pumpkin themed and they have to record the word under the picture the word describes.

The students also build pumpkin themed sentences during literacy center.

We like to do a whole class graphing activity after we taste test pumpkin bread. Pumpkin bread is my favorite and most of the students seem to agree.

The pumpkin unit ties in nicely to non-fiction features. You can snag the definitions for FREE at the end of the post!

After we do an activity where we label the parts of a nonfiction book, I have them break into groups and label the parts of other nonfiction books. To make the chart above, I scanned a nonfiction book and then laminated the pages. I am sorry but it would be illegal for me to share the images I used, you will just have to scan your own. You can whoever get the definitions by clicking above 🙂