Pumpkin Number Match

Hello fall and hello pumpkin season. If you’re as big of a pumpkin fan as I am, you’ll love doing this fun pumpkin counting activity with your kids. For this activity, kids will be counting the seeds in a pumpkin. But, you don’t need a real pumpkin to try this activity! We used yellow pom poms as our pumpkin “seeds.” I designed this activity for my preschooler who is learning that written numbers also represent a physical number. We counted from 1-20, but you can choose any range of numbers for this activity depending on the needs of your children.

MATERIALS NEEDED FOR THE PUMPKIN SEED NUMBER MATCH ACTIVITY:

You probably already have almost everything you need for this activity! Kids will love counting the pom pom “seeds” in their pumpkins.

You will need:

• Yellow pom poms
• Orange paper
• Scissors
• Felt numbers (you can also use magnetic letters or wood letters)

Draw the shape of a pumpkin onto a piece of paper and cut it out.

Get as many yellow pom pom pumpkin “seeds” as you want to use in your activity. We did 1-20.

Stack your numbers randomly.

Pick one number off the pile and have the child say the number. Then, count that many pom poms and add them to the pumpkin as seeds.

Repeat this process until you get through the entire stack of numbers.

This activity is useful because it helps young children see that the written number actually represents a physical number, which is sometimes difficult for kids to learn when they are young. If you notice that your child has difficulty with certain numbers but not others, pull out the easy numbers and just keep the ones you are working on at the time.

You can repeat this activity for numbers up to 100, or make it more complicated for older kids by having each pom pom represent several numbers in skip counting, like 2, 5, or 10.