Paper Plate Pumpkins
We haven’t done too many Halloween or fall crafts with Squeaker this year though I’m not sure why.
Fall is one of my favorite times of the year for many reasons. We’ll kick start that though next month with Thanksgiving, Advent, and Christmas crafts. And plenty of winter themed crafts as well since it seems that Squeaker loves winter and snow just as much as her daddy. But, for now, let’s get back to Fall!
We did do a K-Cup crow that turned out pretty cute, I think. And my personal favorite was our handprint keepsake pumpkin. We also did two apple themed activities with our handprint and pom pom apple tree, plus the toilet paper roll apple stamping.
So I suppose it wasn’t too bad in terms of crafts, especially with Squeaker’s age and attention span. I also let Squeaker paint a pumpkin but that was to keep her occupied while I worked on my mason jar Avengers. Another thing that she did while I was doing that was fingerpaint paper plates. I wasn’t sure what we would do with them but eventually they turned into our paper plate pumpkins.
Recently, Squeaker and I have been working on shape recognition when we do Tot School. Mostly this involves playing with her shape puzzles, looking at books for shapes, and a few other things. I’ll talk about this more when I finally get to our post on shapes for toddlers.
Anyway.
Because of this fascination with shapes, I saw a great opportunity to do a last minute Halloween craft with her. Though I suppose you could also call this an activity, but we’ll go with craft.
Supplies needed:
- paper plates
- fingerpaint (optional, you can also color the plates with markers or crayons)
- construction paper
- scissors (I used scrapbooking scissors to get different edges)
- school glue or glue stick
If you are fingerpainting your paper plates you’ll need to wait a few hours for the paint to dry before assembling your pumpkins. I just felt that the fingerpaint would give us more color… and well, I needed to figure out something to do with those.
For the faces of the paper plate pumpkins, I cut out shapes (triangles, rectangles, and ovals) using a pair of scrapbooking scissors.
I just wanted this for the texture but you can use regular scissors if you’d like. And of course, depending on the age(s) of our child(ren) they can do this part themselves. I used this as an opportunity to talk to Squeaker about shapes and colors as well.
I also put a few feathers in the pile, just to see what she would do with them.
Once we were ready to put our paper plate pumpkins together, I put a dot of glue at the top of the plate for the stem, two dots near the top for the eyes, one just below it for the nose and then four dots below that for the mouth.
As I would put the dots of glue on the plate, Squeaker would count along with me so we also managed to sneak in a little counting activity.
Here’s one of our finished pumpkins:
I also let her help me with putting the glue on one of the pumpkins… that turned out messy, but I think she had a lot of fun creating that one.
All in all, we had a lot of fun assembling our paper plate pumpkins and we got to cover shapes, colors, and numbers in the process.
Kori
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