Duck and Goose Find A Pumpkin: Pumpkin Hunt and Matching Game

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This morning when my little Monkey woke up, one of his favorite books was waiting on the table, and a game was about to begin!

Although the weather is still incredibly hot here, I am determined to acknowledge the beginning of autumn, so I wanted to make some fun fall activities for my little Monkey.  Since he loves the wonderful Duck & Goose series by Tad Hills, I decided to use their fall story Duck & Goose Find A Pumpkin to create some games for him.

This book is all about Duck and Goose’s search through the woods to find a pumpkin.  They look in the leaf pile, the apple tree, the pond, and so on until a friend finally tells them about the pumpkin patch!

We are going to a pumpkin patch in a few days, so I thought my little Monkey would have fun recreating this search in our living room.  I cut ten small pumpkins out of craft foam, using the same template I used for our Pumpkin Suncatcher, just scaled down to a smaller size.

I used various colors because, frankly, I didn’t have enough orange craft foam on hand, but let’s say it was to help him practice his color recognition ;).  To add an extra educational element, I numbered the pumpkins 1-10.

Last night I hid them around our living room, making sure to have some hiding places that were rather obvious and some a little less so.  Of course, you can vary the difficulty depending on the age and ability of your child.  We had so much fun running around finding all of the pumpkins, and afterwards we lined them all up in a row from 1 to 10.  He loves practicing his numbers, so he really enjoyed that aspect of the game as well.

I also made a matching game for the book.  As Duck and Goose look in all of the various places for their pumpkin, it provides the opportunity to discuss what can be found in all of the locations they search.  The pumpkin isn’t in the apple tree, but what is?  Apples!  And so on.

To build on this, I created a matching game that would let my little Monkey match the objects to their proper places (apple to the apple tree, leaf to the leaf pile, etc.)  The first page of the matching game contains the objects, and the second page of the matching game contains the locations.

As you can see, I won’t be illustrating any children’s books soon, but we’re all about developing our kids’ imaginations, right? 🙂

Happy autumn, everyone, and hope you enjoy these games (and this great book!) as much as we do!

This post has been shared at In Lieu of Preschool’s Tuesday Tots, Mama Smiles’ Learning Laboratory, Crystal and Co’s Mommy Club, True Aim Education’s Mom’s Library, the Kid’s Co-op, Enchanted Homeschooling Mom’s Enchanted Thursday, Living Life Intentionally’s TGIF Linky Party, Bowdabra’s Saturday Showcase, Natural Mothers Network’s Seasonal Celebration Sunday, and Say Not Sweet Anne’s Sweet Sharing Monday, and What Do We Do All Day’s Children’s Bookshelf.