4 Fun Ways to Explore Pumpkins this Fall

Pumpkin season is here — and with it comes endless opportunities for creativity, exploration, and hands-on learning! These four invitations blend process art, STEAM discovery, imaginative water play, and fine motor development, making pumpkins the perfect seasonal learning tool.

1. Drip Paint Pumpkin Art: Pumpkin art meets process exploration in this vibrant invitation! To set up, gather real pumpkins and place them flat or slightly elevated inside a sensory bin. Dilute your paint with a bit of water until it reaches the perfect dripping consistency — we used Colorations® Fluorescent BioColor® Paints. Provide silicone mixing cups so children can pour, layer, and experiment as they watch the colors move and blend. Each drip becomes a unique masterpiece and a perfect opportunity to observe gravity, color mixing, and cause-and-effect in action.

2. Pumpkin STEM Building Challenge: This open-ended STEM invitation encouraged children to engineer their own creations using pumpkins as the core building blocks! With @openplaytoys cones, neon plastic cups, recycled CDs, spools, and hair rollers, children explored how balance, weight, and shape influence structure.They stacked, adjusted, and problem-solved, discovering how small design choices could make big differences. It’s a playful way to introduce the engineering and design process, while fostering teamwork, persistence, and creative thinking.

3. Fluorescent Pumpkin “Food” Water Play: In the outdoor Mud Kitchen & Water Play Area, our young chefs were busy stirring up magic! With ladles, whisks, bowls, and buckets — and plenty of pumpkins and gourds — children mixed up imaginative “soups” and “pies” in fluorescent-colored water tinted with BioColor® Paints.This sensory-rich invitation supported imaginative play, language development, and coordination, turning simple materials into a bubbling world of creativity and sensory discovery.

4. Stretch, Snap, and Strengthen-Fine Motor Pumpkin Play: For this fine motor invitation, children explored baskets full of rubber bands and a collection of pumpkins and gourds in all shapes and textures — bumpy, smooth, tall, and round. As they stretched and wrapped, they exercised the small muscles in their hands and fingers, strengthening coordination and control. Some pumpkins required more strength, others precision, and a few had such tricky shapes that the bands popped right off — sparking persistence and problem-solving along the way.

Whether it’s dripping paint, building towers, mixing fluorescent “recipes,” or stretching rubber bands, pumpkins offer so many joyful ways to learn through play. Each invitation brings art, science, and sensory exploration together — all wrapped up in the magic of the season.

Here are other ways to explore pumpkins this season: 3 Pumpkin Invitations, Pumpkin Gravity Water Play,Pumpkin Oobleck, Three Pumpkin Explorations, 5 Little Pumpkins STEM & Small World Play, Pumpkin Pie Spice Market, Pumpkin Slide Painting, Piggies in the Pumpkin Patch, Pumpkin Pie Playdough, Fall Soup.