Fall is the perfect season to infuse your creative movement classes with seasonal themes, and what’s more iconic than pumpkins? Inspired by fantastic ideas from Maria’s Movers, we’ve expanded on pumpkin patch creative movement to bring you engaging and fun “pumpkin dance” activities perfect for various age groups. These activities are designed to get kids moving, exploring, and expressing themselves while celebrating the autumn spirit.
Children pretending to be pumpkins in a dance class
Pumpkin Dance for Preschoolers (Ages 4-5)
Engage your youngest dancers with imaginative play centered around pumpkins. These activities are designed to be simple, repetitive, and full of fun, focusing on basic movement skills and pumpkin-related concepts.
Growing Our Pumpkin Dance
Start with a discussion to spark their imaginations. Ask questions like:
- What shapes and colors are pumpkins?
- Where do pumpkins grow?
- How do pumpkins grow from tiny seeds?
- Can we eat pumpkins? What’s inside?
Then, guide them through a “growing pumpkin dance.” Have the children curl up small on the floor like tiny seeds. As you describe the pumpkin growing, they slowly unfold and expand, reaching upwards and outwards. Encourage them to grow very, very slowly, emphasizing the gradual process. You or your assistants can even playfully act as farmers or pumpkin pickers, inspecting the “pumpkins” as they grow, adding to the imaginative play.
Once they are fully “grown pumpkins,” let them explore rolling around the room. To add another layer of creativity, repeat the growing activity, but this time, tell them their pumpkins are being painted with happy, silly, or scary faces. They can use their facial expressions and body language to embody these emotions as they roll, adding an element of emotional expression to their pumpkin dance.
A group of children dressed in orange and yellow dance costumes resembling pumpkins
Pumpkin Picking Dance Adventure
Transform your dance space into a pumpkin patch for a pumpkin picking adventure! If your students are familiar with pumpkin patches, this activity will resonate even more. Guide them through these movements:
- Tip-toe through the rows: Encourage light, careful movements as they navigate the imaginary pumpkin rows.
- Jump over pumpkins: Incorporate small jumps and leaps, imagining pumpkins scattered in their path.
- Picking Favorite Pumpkins: Have them choose imaginary pumpkins and bring them to the center of the room to create a pumpkin pile.
- Exploring Pumpkin Sizes and Weights: Repeat the picking activity, asking them to find the heaviest, tiniest, fattest, and roundest pumpkins. Encourage them to experiment with different ways of moving with these imaginary pumpkins – carrying, lifting, rolling, and pushing them to the pile, exploring different dynamics and weight awareness in their “pumpkin dance.”
To further enrich the pumpkin patch scene, ask them what else they might see in a pumpkin patch. Incorporate these elements into your movement exploration:
- Crows: Imitate crows flying, perching, and cawing with arm movements and sounds.
- Grass and Corn: Sway like tall grass and corn waving in the wind, using their bodies to create flowing, expansive movements.
- Creepy Crawly Bugs and Worms: Explore low movements, slithering and wiggling like bugs and worms on the ground.
- Scarecrows: Become scarecrows with stiff, straight arms and legs, practicing stillness and contrasting it with the flowing movements.
- Hayride: Gather everyone for an imaginary hayride around the room to conclude this section of the pumpkin dance, adding a fun, collective movement experience.
A family carving pumpkins together at a table, illustrating a pumpkin carving activity
Pumpkin Dance for Elementary Students (Ages 8-11)
For older students, the pumpkin dance activities can be adapted to be more challenging and incorporate dance vocabulary. Use these exercises as a dynamic warm-up or a standalone creative movement session.
Advanced Growing Pumpkin Dance
Start the “growing pumpkin dance” similarly, but with less direct instruction, encouraging more independent exploration.
- Seed to Vines: Focus on slow, sustained movements, growing from a seed to long, twisting, and stretching vines that cover the floor. Emphasize stretching and expanding their bodies fully.
- Leaves and Flowers: Continue stretching, adding movements that represent growing big leaves and even delicate flowers, focusing on fluidity and graceful extensions.
- Pumpkin Shape: Form a round pumpkin shape with their bodies, exploring different levels and shapes.
- Pumpkin Roll: Roll around the space as pumpkins, experimenting with different rolling techniques and speeds.
- Carved Faces: Explore being carved into pumpkins with funny, silly, happy, or scary faces. Encourage them to use facial expressions and incorporate whole-body movements to represent the carving process.
- Rotting Pumpkin: Introduce the concept of decay and rotting, having them slowly collapse and soften their movements, exploring contrasting dynamics in their pumpkin dance.
Pumpkin Picking with Dance Steps
Integrate modern dance vocabulary into the pumpkin picking dance to challenge older students:
- Prancing: Prance through the pumpkin rows, emphasizing light, lifted steps. Incorporate hopping over imaginary pumpkins to add variation and energy.
- Triplets: Imagine wearing boots in muddy pumpkin patch rows and use triplets (three-step patterns) to move, emphasizing the “up-up-squish (down)” feeling of stepping in mud.
Toasted pumpkin seeds, representing a healthy pumpkin snack after dance activities
Have them choose imaginary pumpkins and explore weighted movement by experimenting with carrying their pumpkins in different ways. Repeat this with various sizes and weights, connecting the activity to concepts of dynamics and effort in dance. Introduce the idea of the “Biggest Pumpkin Ever” that is too heavy to move, encouraging collaborative problem-solving and partner work to try and move it.
Pumpkin Carving Creative Movement
Continue the pumpkin theme with a pumpkin carving activity that encourages expressive and dynamic movements:
- Climbing Inside: Imagine the “Biggest Pumpkin Ever” is so large they can climb inside! Have them mime cutting the top off and climbing into the imaginary pumpkin.
- Scooping Seeds: Explore scooping movements, imagining removing the seeds and “gross stuff” from inside the pumpkin, focusing on large, reaching movements.
- Seed Food Fight: Have a playful “food fight” throwing imaginary pumpkin seeds at each other, encouraging energetic and lighthearted movements.
- Scraping Inside: Explore scraping the inside of the pumpkin, using spiraling movements of the torso and arms to represent this action, introducing a more complex movement concept.
- Carving the Face: Climb out of the pumpkin and carve a large face. Use strong, defined movements to represent carving shapes, focusing on creating clear lines and shapes with their bodies.
- Popping Out Face Parts: Climb back inside and “push” hard on the face parts to “pop” them out, using forceful, percussive movements.
- Lighting the Pumpkin: Conclude by miming placing a candle or light inside the pumpkin, bringing a sense of completion and warmth to the pumpkin dance activity.
For even more pumpkin movement ideas and inspiration to expand your “pumpkin dance” repertoire, check out Maria’s latest post with even more creative movement activities.
Share Your Pumpkin Dance Ideas!
Have you incorporated fall-inspired activities into your dance classes? Share your own “pumpkin dance” variations and creative movement ideas in the comments below! Let’s inspire each other to make this fall season full of movement and fun.
