Goofy Pumpkin Faces With A Pumpkin Inspired Lunch

Aren’t these goofy pumpkin faces the cutest? I’ve had this pinned on Pinterest for a couple weeks now. They come from artsy_T Flickr stream, and I guess she makes them with her Kindergarten class every year.

We read The Bumpy Little Pumpkin by Margery Cuyler last night and after reading the story I knew making goofy pumpkin faces would go along perfectly! I seriously dreamt about it last night. haha!

The characters in the story are Little Nell, BIG Mama, BIG Sarah, and BIG Lizzie. It’s Halloween, and the three siblings are looking for pumpkins to carve into jack-o’-lanterns. Little Nell’s selection is deemed too small and ugly by her sisters. Not to be deterred, Little Nell enlists the help of Reindeer, Hare, and Bear Cub and creates a special jack-o’-lantern that can proudly take its place on the porch. As BIG Mama says, Jack-o’-lanterns come in all shapes and sizes!, a line that can be reassuringly applied to children as well.

So this morning the boys sat down and made their very own, unique pumpkin faces.

Materials you will need:
-2 sheets black card stock paper
-1 sheet white card stock paper
-orange paint
-green paint
-scissors
-glue stick

Directions:
1. Have your child cut out a large pumpkin shape out of the white sheet of construction paper. My boys actually used a pencil to draw their pumpkin first and then cut it out. Don’t throw away the scraps because you are going to use them.

2. Paint the pumpkin orange. (Ok, as a sidenote, after completing this project I thought it would have been more fun to have given each child yellow and red paint to mix together to make their own orange color. Not only does it teach about combining different colors, but I’m certain each child would have come out with a different shade of orange making each project more unique. This can also be applied to the green paint, giving each child blue and yellow and having them make their own.)

You can already see how different my boys are just by looking at their painted pumpkins. My oldest paints a thin, smooth layer. My youngest paints everything thick and dark.

3. Take one of the left over white scraps and paint it green. Let the pumpkin and green scrap dry completely.

4. Use a piece of black card stock paper to cut out a mouth and pupils for the pumpkin, and use the other white scrap paper to cut out 2 eyeballs and teeth for the pumpkin.

5. When the pumpkin is dry, glue it to the 2nd piece of black card stock paper. Then glue on the mouth, teeth, eyeballs and pupils.

6. When the green scrap paper is dry, cut out a pumpkin stem and some grass for the bottom of the paper. Then glue them on your page.

We sat the pictures down next to each other when we were all done and discussed the differences between them. One pumpkin is kind of an odd shape, looking like a jalapeno pepper while the other is more oval like. One has a small stem while the other has a huge stem. One has rectangle straight teeth while the other has jagged sharp teeth. One only has a little bit of grass while the other has a lot of grass. So many differences, yet both such perfect, beautiful pieces of art!

I have about 15 different pumpkin crafts I’d love to get done this week…Wish we’d be able to get to all of them, but I know we won’t.

To go along with our pumpkin theme this week we also had a very fun lunch. I made ham & cheese pumpkin wraps.

To make the wraps, I simply used some sun dried tomato and basil wraps and put mayo, ham & swiss cheese inside before rolling it up. After it was rolled up, I cut the ends off and made 6 sections out of each wrap. I put a piece of cilantro on each section and poked a toothpick through the entire section to hold it together nicely. They turned out so cute, looking like little pumpkins.