Five Little Pumpkins + A Freebie

 Hi everyone!  This is Sara from Sara J Creations and I have one of my favorite classroom activities for Halloween to share with you today.  I love using The Five Little Pumpkins with lower elementary students.  There are so many activities that you can do with this.  Each year, I would change it up a bit, depending on my students.

I would usually start with an anchor chart and the words written out like a poem.  I would also give them a copy that they could put in their poetry binders.  I team taught a first and second grade multiage class for four years.  We would usually just have the first graders read the poem, highlight sight words and practice reading it over and over.  We were trying to build their confidence as readers along with more text that they could read independently during reader's workshop.

For our second graders, we always tried to take it a step or two further.  We would usually work with them on punctuation (specifically dialogue punctuation) and contractions.  They loved to highlight the punctuation on the anchor chart.  They also loved learning how to add dialogue to their own writing and suddenly journal time and writer's workshop were filled with stories that attempted to include the correction punctuation so show when someone was talking.  We also connected dialogue to speech bubbles for our second graders.  We showed them how to take what was in quotation marks and move that to a speech bubble.      

 Both our first and second graders would get a book version of The Five Little Pumpkins.  The first graders would usually add illustrations to the book to make sure the words and the pictures matched.  Our second graders would often have to illustrate and then add speech bubbles to show what was being said.

The possibilities are endless.  You could work on retelling, create a felt board to tell the story, create a new version of the story, hunt for sight words, hunt for contractions, illustrate...Can you see why I tried to change it up each year?  There are so many different activities that you can do with this short poem.  

Do you want to try this with your students?  You are in luck because I have made this book into a freebie for you.  And because I know we each work with different levels and want to do different activities, I created 3 different books.  One has the words and illustrations and just needs to be colored.  The second one has the background and the words and needs the pumpkins added.  The third one just has the text and needs the illustrations added.  I've also included a set of speech bubbles that can be cut and glued onto each page.  Click HERE to download your freebie.  

Here is a little step by step guide for assembling the books.  They are super easy, but I know they can be confusing if you haven't assembled books like this before.  

Print out the pages you need.  They will look like this and you will think that those pages will go next to each other but they actually end up back to back.

Fold the pages in half so that the words and pictures are on the outside.  Crease in the middle.

The crease is now on the left for all the pages.

Flip the pages over and put in order so the creased part is now the right side/outside edge.  

Lay the pages inside the cover.  The creases should be facing the right and the open flaps from the pages are now in the middle at the spine.

Close the cover and staple on the left side.

I hope this helps and gives you an idea you can use this week with your students. Thanks for stopping by the punchbowl!

Sara