Fall Fingerplays (Apples and Pumpkins)

Young children love finger plays and rhymes.  When my eldest was little, I created a dozen or so felt board sets to go with different rhymes.  I wanted my youngest to have the same experience, but didn’t want to do the felt thing again. So, I came up with this idea instead.  When I showed it to my son, his eyes lit up and he got so excited! I must have said the rhyme with the pumpkins 10 times before he took over and started playing with them. A success, I’d say! 🙂

Materials

• white paper
• orange and yellow paint (for pumpkins) and
• brown paint (for toilet rolls)
• 5 toilet paper rolls
• empty cereal box
• scissors
• glue
• black paper for faces
• green paper for leaves

Paint the five toilet paper tubes brown (or cover with brown paper) and set aside to dry.

Once the tubes are dry, cut a slit on each side of the tube for the pumpkins to rest. Slits should be about an inch or so long and a little wider than one cut with scissors.

Using the orange and yellow paints, have your child paint two pieces of paper as they like. We started with car painting, then moved to rollers and finished with a regular paintbrush.

    

Allow to dry. We put our paintings in our handy-dandy pizza box drying rack. Love that thing!

Find a picture of a pumpkin you like or draw one. Use it as a template to cut out 5 pumpkins from the paintings made by your child. I found this pumpkin image through a Google Search, pasted it into a document, resized it and then printed it out.  I traced the stencil on the orange paintings to create the 5 pumpkins.

Glue the pumpkins onto the printed side of a cereal box and cut them out again.  I glued them to the printed side so the plain side would be on the back of the pumpkins.

Add a stem to each pumpkin. I used more of the cereal box for our stems.

Add faces to the pumpkins. We used cut paper, but permanent markers would work as well.

Place one pumpkin in each tube as show below. Use the pumpkins with the rhyme below and have fun!

Five Little Pumpkins

5 little pumpkins sitting on a gate.

The first one said, “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! Let’s run!”

The fifth one said, “Isn’t Halloween fun?”

The woosh went the wind and out went the light.

And 5 little pumpkins rolled out of sight.

* * * * * * * * * *

You can also try this with apples. Create 5 apples in the same way as described above and use the Five Red Apples rhyme below.

Five Red Apples

Five red apples

Hanging on a tree.

The juiciest apples you ever did see!

The wind came past

And gave an angry frown

And one little apple came tumbling down.

Four red apples….

OR this one!

Way up high in the apple tree,

Five read apples smiled at me.

I shook that tree as hard as i could,

Dooowwwwwwn came an apple…

Mmmmm, it was good.

Want more seasonal fun?

• Boy Mama: From Green to Gold: Creating Fall Leaves
• Boy Mama: What’s Inside My Pumpkin?
• Boy Mama: Making Indian Corn
• Teacher Mama: Halloween Candy Graphing
• Boy Mama: The Sneakiest Halloween Costume Around