Apples and pumpkins make such a fun Fall theme for early learners. Using this theme will bring the anticipation of Autumn to your lessons and provide opportunities for learning on a wide range of subjects! Are you looking for new ways to incorporate this theme into your lessons? If so, then you are in luck! Today I am sharing all of my favorite apple and pumpkin activities and showing exactly how I use them.

Introduce Apples and Pumpkins with Great Books

Ahhh, children’s books…. be still my heart! You guys already know how much I LOVE books and especially children’s literature! I have a bit of an obsession with great books, and this theme is no exception. Fall is such a magical time of year and there are so many wonderful books out there to get your kiddos excited about apples and pumpkins, it can be hard to choose! Not to worry though, I’ve rounded up a few of my absolute favorites so you can check your local library and get reading.

• Apples by Gail Gibbons
• The Apple Pie Tree by Zoe Hall
• How Do Apples Grow by Betsy Maestro
• Pumpkin Jack by Will Hubbell
• Too Many Pumpkins by Linda White
• The Runaway Pumpkin by Kevin Lewis

Each of these books would be a great starting point to introduce your young learners to the topics of apples and pumpkins. They explore how these plants grow, what we can use them for, and their seasonal wonders. Students will not only love the information they learn but will enjoy the lovely illustrations on every page!

There is no easier way to get “Fall Vibes” than with a good picture book! If you’re looking for even more book inspiration, I listed ALL of my favorites for both apples and pumpkins on my Amazon idea page.

Apple and Pumpkin Activities for Writing

Once you’ve introduced your theme, it’s time to dive into some apple and pumpkin activities! I love to begin new units by incorporating writing lessons. A key component to teaching writing skills effectively is to choose topics of great interest to students. Luckily, apples and pumpkins fit the bill easily!

When learning about pumpkins and apples, I like to start out with vocabulary tracing pages to familiarize kiddos with the words we will be using throughout the lessons. This is a great follow-up activity after reading a few books on the topic. The pages I use for vocabulary practice also have pictures for children still learning to read. After tracing our vocabulary words, we move on to labeling activities to continue to familiarize ourselves with apples and pumpkins.

Another fun writing activity is Would You Rather! Students choose between eating a red apple or green apple, eating apple pie or pumpkin pie, and other pumpkin and apple related items, then write a sentence that tells why they made their choice.

I like to sprinkle other writing activities throughout the duration of time working on apples and pumpkins theme. In my lessons, I love using blank writing pages that leave room for drawings and stories that students create as well as directed drawing activities that provide a little more structure. I find that using a blend of these activities really helps serve a variety of needs and learning styles.

Apple and Pumpkin Activities For Teaching Math

If you’ve been around here a while, you might already know how much I love hands-on learning activities! If you work with early learners yourself, you surely know all about the benefits of using hands-on learning activities in your lessons. When incorporating hands-on learning activities, you can expect high student engagement and interest, making it a breeze to teach just about any topic!

I especially love these types of activities to teach math. There are so many fun manipulatives and tools you can use to really level up your math lessons. Some of my favorite apple and pumpkin activities for math include:

• Playdough Shape Mats: Kids LOVE playdough! Take advantage of this and help them work on those fine motor skills while learning their shapes. The playdough mats I like feature a “build it, trace it, write it” format so kiddos will also get practice with writing skills as well!
• Math Puzzles: Center time should be filled with fun games for high levels of engagement! Puzzles are always a classroom favorite, so I like to incorporate a variety of them that focus on number matching as well as building numbers 1-10.
• Sorting By Size: I love using various sizes of apple and pumpkin printables to teach about sorting by size. Engage critical thinking by giving your kiddos a stack of cards and asking them to arrange them in order from smallest to largest. This is a fun activity to try during circle time or centers.

We use lots of other fun apple and pumpkin activities like these during our lessons to target math skills. The key is to make sure you’re choosing activities that are appealing and a bit challenging to your kiddos to keep things interesting!

Apple and Pumpkin Activities For Literacy Topics

If you teach littles you know, literacy is HUGE! So much of your day revolves around mastering letters, beginning sounds, and phonics concepts. Since we spend so much time on this topic, it’s a good idea to make sure you have some “show-stopper” activities that will grab the attention of your students!

Feed The Apple Basket & Pumpkin Games

“Feed the….” activities always steal the show with young learners! There is just something so exciting and fun about these activities, making it easy to captivate attention. If you’ve never seen these before, it’s basically a cut-out of some kind of animal, person, or object with an open mouth. Children will have cards targeting some type of concept that they need to identify before “feeding” their card to the object.

For the apples and pumpkins theme, I use this activity to target beginning sounds as well as syllables. Children will grab a card and say the beginning sound before deciding if it’s a match and can be “fed” to the apple basket. For syllables, kiddos will choose a card, clap the number of syllables for the picture on the card and then “feed it” to the pumpkin that displays that number. This activity gets SO many giggles and keeps kiddos engaged for a long time! This is fun as a circle time activity or for independent learning that gives kiddos a break from pencils and paper.

More Literacy Activities

As with any topic, I love having a wide variety of literacy activities available. In addition to our “feed the…” games, I have a few favorites that I always plan to use for this theme:

• Roll and Cover: Target beginning sounds with no-prep printable pages. The ones I use have a variety of pictures to keep students intrigued.
• Pocket Chart Games: Pocket chart matching games are always a go-to, no matter what the theme. For apples and pumpkins activities, I focus on a game that helps children practice matching uppercase letters to lowercase. After our game, we use a corresponding worksheet as a follow-up.
• Crack the Code: This activity lets students solve a mystery by writing the appropriate letter for a collection of pictures. Once all the letters are filled in, fun seasonal messages are revealed!

Engaging Apple and Pumpkin Science Activities

Perhaps the best thing about this entire unit is the science component! After all, apples and pumpkins are a fun focal point for surprising discoveries! When we cover this topic, I like to make sure I spend a fair bit of time diving into science-based apple and pumpkin activities.

I like to first go over the parts of apples and pumpkins and display full-color, posters that detail these differences. We discuss the life cycles and how apples and pumpkins go from seed to plant and what to expect in each step of the process. I find that children are quite captivated by these lessons and always eager to learn more, so I made some non-fiction readers to accompany this activity. It’s such an easy way to connect since and language arts skills.

Kiddos can put their books together, color the pictures and then share this information with family members later. Children always enjoy being the “experts” on a new topic!

After we have learned all about how apples and pumpkins grow, we always spend some time working through science activities like sink or float, estimating and counting seeds, weight, and more! Children love the hands-on exploration element of these activities and they are always a hit!

More Engaging Learning Activities

So we have covered math, literacy, writing, and science but the fun doesn’t need to stop there! This topic is so great for fun, whole group activities and I highly recommend including a few in your lessons. Participating in group activities will help bring a sense of community to your classroom as you celebrate the fall season with apples and pumpkins! If you are homeschooling, then these are activities that can be done with the entire family, or grab a couple of other homeschooling families for a day of apple and pumpkin fun!

Ideas To Get You Started

• Make Applesauce: Yes! You can absolutely make homemade applesauce. The recipe I use, only has a few simple ingredients and kiddos will be floored by how delicious their homemade treat tastes. This is a great activity to open the discussion around all the foods we can make with apples and pumpkins. I love making an anchor chart to support this as the students brainstorm their ideas.
• Make Play Dough: All kiddos love playdough and making your own apple-scented one will definitely level up your fine motor activities. Mix up a batch of apple-pie-scented playdough to use with your math play dough mats!
• Apples Tasting & Graphing: This activity is always a hit! Children love comparing the taste of red, green, and yellow apples and then graphing their favorites. I love making a large classroom graph if I have a big group but this is always fun on a worksheet if you only have a couple of kiddos. Homeschoolers can ask family members to weigh in on their favorite flavors as well!
• Practice Skills With Color by Code: You guys already know how much I love color-by-code activities and for good reason! They are so versatile and fit any theme. I love incorporating color-by-code pages in my apples and pumpkins activities to reinforce the skills we are learning. I use editable pages so that I can swap out the concept easily.
• Apple and Pumpkin Craftivities: I love a good, themed craft! They make such a great keepsake and it’s fun to look back on what your kiddos have learned. Not to mention, the children are always excited to participate. For the apples and pumpkin theme, I always include some writing craftivities that allow students to jot down some information they have learned.

Get Started with Apple and Pumpkin Activities Today!

Are you excited to dive into this topic with your kiddos? I hope so! Apples and pumpkins are such a fun and engaging topic for young children and you really can stretch this theme out throughout the fall season. With a variety of math, literacy, science, writing, and crafting activities students will be engaged and excited to learn each day!

Looking for a one-stop-shop option to set yourself up with apples and pumpkin activities this season? You can find ALL of the resources I mentioned (and more!) in my comprehensive Apples and Pumpkins Unit! This jam-packed resource is filled to the brim with a variety of activities and differentiation options to fit your needs. Take the guesswork out of your planning and let the learning begin!

Looking for More Themed Activities?

If you love teaching with themes, then make sure to check out these blog posts for more themed units like this one!

• Shark Activities for Kids
• Fun and Easy Bee Activities

Save These Apple and Pumpkin Activities

Don’t forget to pin this post to your favorite fall Pinterest board so you will have everything you need right at your fingertips!