This pumpkin craft is a fun way to build fine motor skills and to use recycled materials at the same time. This cute pumpkin craft was actually designed, created, and photographed by my daughters! I love to see them doing what they love: creating homemade crafts while fostering occupational balance and helping others build skills by sharing such a fun Fall craft.
Pumpkin Fine Motor Activity
By making this mini pumpkin craft, kids can build many fine motor skills. It’s a pumpkin fine motor activity without the goopy mess of pumpkin guts and seeds!
This is a great Halloween occupational therapy activity to add to your toolbox…Just by making this Halloween craft, kids can build dexterity, refined grasp, and precision. Let’s break down how this craft builds fine motor skills:
Precision– The pumpkin craft is a miniature pumpkin, just sized right for a bottle cap. Working on a small scale, kids can work on precision of grasp as they pick up and manipulate the materials.
Pincer grasp- In fact, that tip to tip grasp that uses the pads of the pointer finger and they thumb, pincer grasp is used. This refined grasp is needed to pick up the googly eyes, pinch and place tape, maneuver the pipe cleaner piece.
Neat pincer grasp– When that pincer grasp requires even more precision and the tips of the pointer finger and the thumb bend at the last joint, a neat pincer grasp is used. This grasp is needed to pick up very small items such as a mini-jack-o-lantern eyes and cutouts.
Separation of the sides of the hand– Manipulating tape, picking up small items, and cutting with scissors fosters the fine motor skill of separation of the sides of the hand. This skill is essential for a functional pencil grasp.
Bilateral coordination– Pulling and ripping tape is a great bilateral coordination task. Kids can use coordinated use of both hands throughout this pumpkin craft activity. Working on a small scale in a craft like this one pulls concentrated near-point work at the midline, making it a nice pre-cursor activity to refine skills needed for reading, writing, and other tasks requiring fine motor coordination skills.
Gross grasp– Hand strength is built through the power side of the hand, or the ulnar side. When the power side is strengthened through gross grasp activities like squeezing a glue bottle, kids can gain more stability in the hand as they complete fine motor tasks. Squeezing the glue bottle in a small space requires a refined grasp, so glue is stopped when appropriate and there isn’t a giant pool of glue all over the table. This ability to squeeze a glue bottle in a small spot with accuracy isn’t easy for some kiddos! Here is more information on gross grasp.
Scissor skills– This fine motor Halloween activity has very small scissor work, making it a nice way to work on precision and graded scissor skills.
Let’s make a Cute Pumpkin Craft for Kids!
First step is to gather all of your materials. Your materials for this pumpkin craft are: (Amazon affiliate links included below)
- Orange bottle caps
- Brown pipe cleaners
- green pipe cleaners
- Orange washi tape
- Black construction paper
- Scissors
- Squeeze glue
How to make a pumpkin craft
Let’s get started with making this cutie mini pumpkin craft.
- First, cut the pipe cleaners to a length of about one inch. Put the pipe cleaners on the edge of one bottlecap. When you have it in a good spot add orange tape on the sides so it will stick.
2. Place the second bottle cap on the edge of the first bottle cap so the rims are touching and sandwiching the pipe cleaners. Add a strip of orange tape around the outside of both bottle caps for a 3D pumpkin craft!
3. Cut a small piece of the green pipe cleaner and bend it into a leaf shape.
4. Then cut out your black construction paper to make a small jack-o-lantern face.
5. Next, glue the small construction paper pieces in the position you would like it to be on one of the bottle caps.
Have fun building fine motor skills with this mini pumpkin craft!
More Halloween Crafts you will love
Grab the Pumpkin Fine Motor Kit for more coloring, cutting, and eye-hand coordination activities with a Pumpkin theme! It includes:
- 7 digital products that can be used any time of year- has a “pumpkins” theme
- 5 pumpkin scissor skills cutting strips
- Pumpkin scissor skills shapes- use in sensory bins, math, sorting, pattern activities
- 2 pumpkin visual perception mazes with writing activity
- Pumpkin “I Spy” sheet – color in the outline shapes to build pencil control and fine motor strength
- Pumpkin Lacing cards – print, color, and hole punch to build bilateral coordination skills
- 2 Pumpkin theme handwriting pages – single and double rule bold lined paper for handwriting practice
Work on underlying fine motor and visual motor integration skills so you can help students excel in handwriting, learning, and motor skill development.
You can grab this Pumpkin Fine Motor kit for just $6!
Tiny Pumpkin Crafts
We loved making this mini pumpkin craft for building precision and neat pincer grasp. By cutting the mini pumpkin faces from paper, you really work on refined motor skills.
You can expand this activity by pairing it with our pumpkin emotions activity. Ask the child/student to identify emotions and then make that pumpkin face with the tiny pumpkins.
Or, include more self-regulation concepts by using the tiny pumpkins along with our free pumpkin deep breathing exercise. Trace the deep breathing arrows with the tiny pumpkins! You can even discuss how small changes (and mini pumpkins!) make a big difference.
Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.
