Today’s geo pumpkin craft fun was inspired by the photos on several sites for Halloween activities. This gives us another day for pumpkin play and learning.
What is a geo pumpkin? The name geo pumpkin comes from the math resource known as a geo board. This is a square board with pins or nails placed in evenly-spaced rows. Kids wrap elastic bands around the pins to make geometric shapes and other designs. You may remember playing with them at school. Now, they are a more common learning toy.
Geo pumpkins can be decorated with a variety of materials, like pins, golf tees, nails, elastic bands, ribbon, yarn, and buttons. To make our geo pumpkins we started with push pins. These were easier for Little Sister to hold. Because I sew quite often, I have a couple of pin cushions that the kids like to touch. They take out the pins and rearrange them. Big Sister used both push and straight pins.
Once the pumpkin had a few pins stuck in, with repetitions of owie, owie, the kids began adding the yarn, elastic bands, ribbon, and buttons. Mostly these were scraps that live in the bottom drawer in the sewing desk. They weren’t limited by any preconceived ideas of what they should look like. They were able to create as they wanted. On one point, Little Sister asked for a different elastic band because one was too big. I showed her how to attach the elastic to a different pin farther away. She looked for a minute and then noticed it now made a triangle.
Fingers and fine motor skills got a work out manipulating all these little pieces but so did brains. Just a few thinking skills included are problem-solving, planning, predicting, visualizing, and creating. As they played, there was a great deal of talking and explaining. Little Sister used self-talk, whispering, “Push it in, push it in.” Big Sister who goes to school used several bits of fabric and stretched the elastic around pins to make a jack-o-lantern mouth.
The season for pumpkin play is relatively short. Geo pumpkin craft fun was a great way to play with one before we carve it into a jack-o-lantern. Another time, we made faces on one with play dough. What ways does your child play with pumpkins?