Fall is one of my favorite season and there are so many interesting and exciting things happening that can help students grasp a skill being taught. Pumpkins are a great item to bring into the classroom to help teach students all about adjectives in a fun, engaging way. If you don't feel like hauling in pumpkins, don't worry, I have the solution for you!
I started off my whole group lesson by displaying four Jumbo Pumpkin Classroom Cutouts. This set contains 50 pumpkins in many different sizes and shapes that are perfect for the classroom. As we were looking at the posters, we shared things that were similar and different between the pumpkins. I kept a quick anchor chart of words being shared. After our conversation, I introduced to students what an adjective was using their very own descriptive words as the starting point. I explained that they already knew what an adjective was but they didn't know that they were using the skill! Using colorful word strips cut into pieces, we labeled the pumpkins using our words and attached using washi tape. I use the colorful word strips for so many different things in my classroom, I highly recommend grabbing a set. Since this is an introductory lesson, we kept the adjectives pretty simple.
It was now time for students to create their own special pumpkin using one enormous pumpkin shape and a mixture of Jack-O'Lantern Face Stickers.
There are so many options for each body part! The possibilities are endless.
My students loved these stickers! Check out all of the different amazing faces that could be made.
To access students' understanding of adjectives, I asked them to write one sentence using an adjective to describe their unique pumpkin! Based on the levels of your students, this could easily be differentiated to be one adjective, a list, or even a short story.