Playing with Pumpkin seeds and Color Sorting with Dyed Pumpkin Seeds were something I thought about as soon as we carved our jack-o-lanterns this year. We sorted the seeds into a super sensory playing activity that ended up having a great learning component too! We ended up using our dyed pumpkin seeds in so many playful ways over the last few weeks. We’ve sorted, created patterns, made collage art, and more. We will definitely be dying (as well as roasting) our pumpkin seeds every year from now on!
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Have you ever dyed pumpkin seeds before? This was our first time, so it was a learning experience. And, we haven’t even made too many batches of roasted seeds either that we LOVED. We posted the question to our Facebook page asking for roasted seed recipes. We got some great replies and ended up trying a little dying and a little roasting!
(we roasted our seeds for eating with a little olive oil, salt, and paprika. Perfection!)
To dye the seeds, I put a handful of dry seeds in a plastic baggie and added a few drops of food coloring. All it took was a few shakes of the bag to cover the seeds. I wasn’t sure if vinegar would be needed to get the dye to “stick” to the seeds, but it seemed to work ok without. A few kiddos enjoyed shaking baggies (and jumping around the house with them…)! We made blue, yellow, and green…only because those were the colors of liquid food dye I had on hand. Once they were covered with color, we poured the seeds onto a cookie sheet covered with paper towels and let them dry.
Drying required a full 24 hours and a couple of re-scattering to make sure all of the seeds were uncovered. Once they were dry, we were ready to play!
Color Sorting with Dyed Pumpkin Seeds
This was a great activity for Baby Girl and Little Nephew (both 2 years old). I had this set up one day after the kids woke up from their naps. A few of our The First Years 4 Pack Take And Toss Spill Proof Cups
were perfect to match the colors of our seeds.
They had so much fun with this! Little Nephew really enjoyed this activity. He played for a long time sorting the seeds (and a lot of not sorting, too…just dropping the seeds into cups).
There were a lot of hands involved in this activity. It was a good thing we had three different colors and cups!
Watch this space to see what else we did with our colorful pumpkin seeds!
