STEAM Learning Lab – Emoji Pumpkin and Pumpkin Poetry

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We are celebrating the last week of our spooky month by dedicating an entire week to pumpkins! Learn more about these gorgeous gourds with daily STEAM Learning Lab lessons. Today we bring you two lessons: Emoji Pumpkin and Pumpkin Poetry!

Emoji Pumpkin
Ages 2 and up

This can be a great no-carve pumpkin option! By creating a lot of different cutouts kids can swap what emoji their pumpkin is displaying several times before Halloween. Best of all, while this activity was easy enough for even young children to help with, older kids might especially enjoy making funny emoji faces on their pumpkins.

Materials:

  • Medium-sized pumpkin
  • Construction paper
  • Scissors
  • Yellow Paint
  • tape

Directions:

  1. Paint pumpkin yellow
  2. Let dry 1 hour
  3. While it's drying, look at emojis on your phone. Cut emoji face shapes, like smiles, circles, or hearts for eyes out of construction paper
  4. Tape emoji facial expressions onto pumpkins


Pumpkin Poetry
Ages 2 and up

Sometimes the hardest part of writing is getting started. By using pumpkins as a starting point, tackling a new writing project can be easy!  Poetry is a great literacy activity to do with younger children and can introduce them to new words, rhythms, and descriptive language. Since poems can be short and informal, it’s a great way to begin writing for children. By combining it with art, kids can see a finished writing project quickly, and which can encourage them to try new writing adventures in the future.

These two activities invite kids to look at an object and translate what they see into words. It is a great opportunity to make poetry feel less intimidating and get even young children thinking of themselves as poets! If you want to have even more poetry fun, try doing both activities and ask kids to compare them. It can be a great chance to talk about what a poem can be and they noticed about pumpkins.

Pumpkin Shape-Poem

Materials:

  • Colored pencils or crayons
  • Paper

Directions:

  1. Have kids write a poem about pumpkins
  2. Take the poem and rewrite with your crayon or colored pencil so that the words form the shape of a pumpkin. Tip: for young kids, lightly sketch the pumpkin shape first so that the words can rest on the sketch. Older kids might enjoy the challenge of trying to make a picture using words.


Pumpkin Adjective Poem

Materials:

  • Pen
  • Strips of Paper
  • Bowl

Directions:  

  1. Have children write one word to describe a pumpkin on each strip of paper
  2. Fold the papers
  3. Put the folded papers in a bowl
  4. Pull out papers at random, and keep them in the order they are pulled out of the bowl
  5. Have them write a poem about something unrelated to pumpkins using the words they pulled out of the bowl. See if they can keep the words in the order they were removed from the bowl!

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