So, a few days ago, harassed, and on the hunt for some pistachios and a nice bottle of red in Waitrose, I succumbed to Freddie’s request that he ‘needed’ a pumpkin. Once I had lugged the bloody thing home (hard with three bags of shopping and two toddlers!), I wondered what else we could do with it, aside from the obvious face carving.

I had come across an ‘objects examination chart’ in a church hall that we attend a playgroup in, and thought that I could apply it to the pumpkin. I got a big sheet of paper, and wrote various questions and categories that we could ask/talk about when looking at our pumpkin. I obviously adapted these for my two year old, and made each question very simple, with the aim of getting Freddie to describe the pumpkin.

These included:

• What colour is our pumpkin? (and getting him to pick the appropriate colour pen)
• How big is our pumpkin?
• What does our pumpkin feel like?
• What does our pumpkin have/look like?
• Is it heavy?
• How many blocks tall is it? (we used MegaBloks and counted and stacked them next to the pumpkin)

Freddie also enjoyed trying to colour it in with felt tip pens (his lead, not mine!), and trying to roll it.

Once we had finished our external pumpkin investigation, I decided to let Freddie enjoy the inside ‘guts’ of the pumpkin!

Carefully cutting the top of the pumpkin, I gave it back to him with a spoon, and let him get stuck in with this and his hands. Plunging them in, his first comment was “yucky!”. After that, he wasn’t so keen to use his little mits, but did carry on with the spoon, and seemed to enjoy fishing some of the seeds out and spending time lining them up (the boy is a neat freak already!)

After a while, I got a load of the ‘guts’, put them in a freezer bag, sealed with a tie, and gave them back to him in the bag, for some squishy, sensory fun. I’d supervise this, so that the bag doesn’t burst and the guts spill everywhere, as they nearly did when F decided to stand on them!

This activity was great, and killed about half an hour whilst Sasha was sleeping- perfect for a rainy autumn day!