Paper Plate Pumpkin Handprint Craft & Poem for kids

We made Paper Plate Pumpkins with Handprint Stems for a fun Halloween craft and to get ready for our trip to the pumpkin patch. It was a new word for Little Sister and she can't get enough of saying it! Both my preschool-aged son and my toddler loved this craft. I also read them a cute pumpkin poem. You can find the cute Halloween Poem here. I told my son that the pumpkins are happy when you take them home because they like to decorate our home like it says in the poem.

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First, they painted the paper plates orange. Little Sister couldn't resist getting her hands in it too!

 

We made green handprints, cut around them, and glued them on for stems. I saw the adorable stem idea from Babies, Toddlers, and Preschoolers, Oh My! To add our own spin on her already super cute craft, I had the kids use glitter glue pens to decorate their pumpkins with. Big Brother had been begging all day if he could please use them! I love how sparkly they looked when they dried.

I also printed funny pumpkin faces for the kids to glue on. Little Sister didn't quite put the nose and mouth in the right place, but she did a great job with the eyes!

To go along with their sparkling pumpkins, we read the book Happy Sparkling Halloween (Sparkling Stories). It was suitable for both the ages of my children. The illustrations are fun & shiny and the story rhymes throughout. The end of the book is cute and helped me explain to my 4 year old that they are just costumes (or toys, decorations, etc.) and that aren't actually scary at all- in the book a giant ghoul appears but it turns out to be just the dad... he, he. I love the way the author makes it funny for the kids to find out it's just the dad in an adorable, rhyming way.