Golf Tee Pumpkin Fun

 

I was WAY more excited about this activity than my kiddos were. This is true more times than not, but I'm hoping it will level out here in the near future. ;)

I came across a golf tee pumpkin hammering activity from one of the blogs I follow on Facebook and immediately placed it on my mental "we must do this as soon as possible" list. As soon as I found golf tees it was ON, and BOY was it FUN!

We started with a couple hammers, small pumpkins, and golf tees. What a great way to use those cute lil' pumpkins we got from visiting the pumpkin patch! I think anytime you put a hammer in the hands of a child it equates to loads of fun in their eyes.

The kiddos were super excited about hammering and got to work right away. They seemed to know exactly what to do and didn't even care to listen to directions or watch me model first, they just took off!

I just love the picture of my lil guy holding the tee and hammering away. It took him a bit of time to figure out exactly how to hold it just right but he figured it out and it was such a joy to watch him.

The kiddos even spent a good amount of time pulling all of the tees out and replacing them again without the hammer.

Every bit of this activity was tons of fun in and of itself, but I'm so excited to share some awesome extension activities with you as well.

I quickly followed up with making sure there were 26 tees in one of the small pumpkins then used a marker to write a single letter of the alphabet on each tee. I then cut and tied some yarn to the stem of the pumpkin (even though I didn't do so, a bit of hot glue here would be helpful) and we had our very own connect the dots activity! It was such a huge hit!

I wondered if holding the yarn snug, wrapping each tee once, and slowing releasing yarn between the finger and thumb would be too much for my little ones to handle but after a bit of practice and some help, they were successful at doing it on their own. 

I repeated the same concept with numbers 1-20 on the next pumpkin.

 

If your little ones get really good at this and have even got to where they've memorized the route of the ABC or number "maze" you could simply pull the tees out and rearrange them, giving the maze a brand new feel and experience. You could even try giving them the responsibility of rearranging! They'd love that!

The 3rd pumpkin had the fewest tees so I decided to use them for color matching. I used permanent markers to color a pair of tees the same color. I looked through a bag of colored rubber bands to make sure I had a band that matched the colors I chose for the tees. It was so much fun watching my 2 year old use his itty bitty fingers to sssstretch those rubber bands over the matching pairs of colored tees.

There are SO many ways to differentiate this activity! Here's a few I've thought of, using rubber bands to match or pair items:

• upper and lower case letters
• shapes
• shapes paired with their number of sides or angles

You could even create a key that indicated which colored rubber bands are to be used for different outcomes or answers:

• yellow band around 2 numbers whose sum is 7 (e.g. 4 and 3 or 2 and 5)
• green band around 2 numbers whose difference is 3 (e.g. 8 and 5 or 6 and 3)

You could also use the yarn "maze" for skip counting practice. The possibilities are truly endless! In fact, I have 3 large pumpkins sitting outside on the porch who I think like are begging me to involve them in our learning experiences. If I get the chance to grab another bag of tees they most definitely will.