Halloween Jack O’Lanterns open the door to discussing emotions with children! Talk about feelings with this free pumpkin faces printable for kids. Find more Halloween activities for preschoolers.
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Pumpkin Faces for Kids Printable
What You'll Find on This Page
Guest Post by Carolyn from Party with Unicorns. Carolyn’s site is full of all sorts of fun, free printables for kids! If you like this post, you should definitely check out her Halloween hand puppets and cute DIY Halloween favor bags.
You might also enjoy this haunted house printable activity from my blog.
Now, on to Carolyn’s post!
How Are You Feeling, Jack-o-Lantern?
Printable Emotions Activity for Kids.
With three small kids in our family, we live in a house full of big, fat, feelings. Kids feel things so deeply and so quickly that sometimes it feels like we are all on a roller coaster. One minute they are over the moon happy, and the next they are upset and struggling to understand how they feel.
Teaching kids how to identify emotions and feeling is so important for helping them navigate their world. Children with larger emotional vocabularies are less likely to use non-verbal methods (tantrums, crying, screaming) to express their feelings. This makes like much easier for everyone!
Jack-O-Lanterns are a fun way to engage children about different facial expressions and emotions. They offer an opportunity to talk children about feelings in a safe and unemotional context.
I am happy to share this printable activity to help you start a conversation with your kids about feelings. I am calling this game “How are you feeling, Jack-o-Lantern?”
How to Set up this Pumpkin Feelings Activity
This is a simple activity, and very easy to set up. Simply print out the How are you feeling Jack-o-Lantern? activity worksheets.
Cut out all of the face elements and emotion names (Tip – If you plan on reusing this game, laminate all the pieces, and the pumpkin worksheet. Alternatively, use the pieces as templates to cut the elements out with felt.)
How to Use the How Are You Feeling, Jack-o-Lantern? Activity
For younger kids, Once the pieces are cut out, your child can sit down and create their own Jack-O-Lanterns. Once they create a face on the Jack-o-Lantern template, you can ask them about the face they have created.
If children struggle to articulate what they have created, you can ask some prompting questions like, “How do you think this Jack-o-Lantern is feeling?” or, “Why do you think the Jack—Lantern feels that way?”
You can also ask children how they might change the way the Jack-O-Lantern is feeling with questions like, “How can we make that Jack-O-Lantern feel better?”
If you child is a little bit older and starting to read, then they can use the emotion words to label their creations.
How Are You Feeling, Jack-o-Lantern Printables
You can download the activity sheets by clicking on this text, or on the image below.
I hope you find some time to enjoy this fun activity with your kids this Halloween Season.
What are your favorite ways to practice emotions with kids? Do you have a fun pumpkin themed activity or recipe we should try?
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Carolyn Goepel
Carolyn Goepel is an event manager, crafter and mum of three young children. She is dedicate to creating fun content to help parents engage with their kids. Her blog, Party with Unicorns provides everything from craft templates, colouring pages, party printables and more.
This looks like so much fun even though we don’t really celebrate Halloween around here. I love this time of year.
Amalia
xo