🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop

• 🎨 Creativity & Imagination — Open-ended activities that let children direct their own play grow creative thinking, original problem solving, and the confidence to express personal ideas.
• 💬 Language Development — Narrating play, hearing new vocabulary, and describing what they're doing dramatically expands children's language range and the sentence complexity they'll bring to reading and conversation.
• 🎯 Focus & Attention — Sustaining engagement with an activity long enough to complete it builds the voluntary attention control that children need for listening in class, reading, and all forms of academic learning.
• 📐 Spatial Reasoning — Thinking about how objects relate in space — fitting shapes together, building structures, filling containers — develops the spatial intelligence that predicts success in mathematics and STEM fields.

By Julie Pirkle

Sweeten your preschooler’s next Halloween party with the candy corn pumpkin toss activity. A Halloween version of a classic carnival game, the candy corn pumpkin toss activity will delight preschool partygoers and turn up the friendly competition as they try and toss candy corns into plastic pumpkins for points. If you’re not the highest scorer, don’t fret. Everyone gets to eat his/her candy corns after the game! What could be better than that?

What You Will Need

One or More Plastic Pumpkin Trick-or-Treat Buckets

Large Bag of Candy Corn

Masking Tape

What to Do

Step 1:

Set up your plastic pumpkin(s) in an open area. If you are using multiple pumpkins, arrange them similar to bowling pins.

Step 2:

Make a large X with two pieces of masking tape in front of the pumpkin(s). This will be the spot where participants will stand to toss their candy into the pumpkin. For younger preschoolers, position the tape closer to the preschoolers. Move it farther back to create more of a challenge for older preschoolers. If both younger and older preschoolers are playing together, you may want to make two Xs: one where the younger preschoolers stand and one where the older preschoolers stand.

How to Play

Step 1:

Position the first preschooler on the masking tape X.

Step 2:

Give the preschooler 10 pieces of candy corn.

Step 3:

Instruct the preschooler to try and toss his candy corn pieces one at a time into the pumpkin(s).

Step 4:

Tally up the number of candy corns the preschooler made into the pumpkin(s)

Step 5:

Repeat steps 1 through 4 with each participant.

Step 6:

Announce the winner. Whoever got the most candy into the pumpkin(s) wins.

Step 7:

Award a prize to the winner. Preschool Activities suggests a Halloween pencil or stickers. Visit Preschool Activities Halloween Store to purchase Halloween prizes and party supplies.

Step 8:

Let all the preschoolers eat their candy corn!

Candy Corn Pumpkin Toss Variation

For more of a challenge, use multiple pumpkins and assign different point values to each one. To make the activity even “trickier” put some pumpkins higher up. You can do this by placing them on chairs or boxes.