Our Harvest Garden has been picked clean of all fruits and vegetables except for pumpkins, squash and gourds.
The tools remained the same, rakes, little shovels and lots of baskets. I put the grocery carts away the first day but realized the children really missed them. The toddlers love to have something to push around. Be it a baby carriage, a shopping cart or even the big Tonka trucks. So they came back out.
The following are activity centres that were set up around the pumpkin patch.
Make a face on the scarecrow can be done over and over again. I bought the facial features at a dollar store. The ends are pointy so they are easy to push into the pumpkin.
This centre has three focuses.
I picked up paint chip samples from the store and left them for the children to try to match the colour of the pumpkins.The middle activity is matching the base of pumpkins. Finding the right size; big, medium or small.
Estimating.
Measuring.
And finally a project we did two years ago and one that we will repeat this year.
After Hallowe'en we take one of the little pumpkins, cut it open remove some of the seeds and press them into the soil. Leave the rest of the pumpkin to rot (which is fun to watch). As the seeds sprout and grow we eventually transferred them to pots. Some went home with families and a few we kept over the winter. In the spring one of the families volunteered to plant our plants in their garden. The following fall when school was back in session we would check on the plants and then at Hallowe'en we harvested the pumpkins.
