Our Homeschool October: Pumpkins, Harvest Festivals, and Three Free Printables

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October is my favorite month to homeschool, and it is one of the months our school looks least like school.

The pumpkin patch becomes our field trip, the read-aloud pile turns orange, and even the handwriting pages have leaves on them, because a five-year-old will trace scarecrow three times before they trace the once.

Here is what October looks like at our table, the books on the shelf, and the printables I made for it. They are yours.

The pumpkin patch

We go early in the month, on a weekday morning when the field is empty and the cider is hot, and we go to enjoy it. That is the whole plan. The learning happens on its own, the way it always does when children are outside and interested.

My son picks the pumpkin he can carry by himself and counts its ridges on the drive home. The girls guess the weight before we pay, then check their guess on the scale. That is counting, estimating and measuring in one morning, and all anyone talks about afterward is the cider.

A pumpkin can carry a month of school.

Then the pumpkins come home, and one pumpkin can carry a month of school: seeds counted by tens and roasted with salt, then one left on the porch to soften while we talk about why. If you want a whole month of that kind of learning, our favorite fall unit studies has the ideas we go back to every year.

Mandy's daughter at a wall of pumpkins at the pumpkin patch

Harvest festivals around the world

A pumpkin carried home is a small harvest, and it is the easiest way I know to start a bigger conversation. Families all over the world are gathering their crops this time of year and stopping to celebrate, the way we do at Thanksgiving.

In South Korea, families gather for Chuseok in traditional dress. In China, they light lanterns and eat mooncakes for the Moon Festival. In Ghana and Nigeria, the Yam Festival celebrates one of Africa’s most important crops. Germany has Erntedankfest. Cornwall has Guldize, with fruit pastries and cider.

I put six of them in a little book you can print, cut and staple: the Fall Harvest Festivals Around the World mini book. Print pages 2 through 6, cut and staple. Read it aloud and let the littlest color the pages.

Handwriting with leaves on it

October is when I swap the handwriting pages for the fall ones. Same skill, better mood. A sentence about geese flying south gets copied more carefully than a sentence about nothing.

For the three-to-fives: Fall Fun Trace and Color — forty fall words, one to a page, to trace and then color. One page a day gets you through October with a preschooler who thinks it is a coloring book.

For the six-to-eights: Fun Fall Facts Handwriting — forty pages, a fall fact on each, traced first and then copied underneath. Why leaves change, where the geese go, what a harvest moon is. Ten minutes at the table, and the fact comes back at dinner, which is how you know it went in.

What one pumpkin teaches: count the ridges, guess the weight then weigh it, measure it with yarn, count the seeds by tens and roast them, watch it soften on the porch

Both print on regular paper. No prep.

The books on the shelf this month

The fall stack comes down the first week of October — the pumpkin books, the scarecrow books, the one about a leaf’s last day, all read to pieces. If your October has costumes in it, the pumpkin books carry the month. If you keep Halloween out of your house, the harvest books do the same work without a single ghost. I wrote about how both kinds of family do October well, and the books work either way.

Mandy laughing with her daughters on hay bales at the pumpkin patch

One more, because it is my favorite

Every year the living room becomes a pumpkin patch for a week. A banner across the doorway. A sign for the corn maze. A menu for the cider stand. A weigh station with the real kitchen scale. My son runs the whole thing, and his sisters are the customers who never have quite enough money.

The Pumpkin Patch Pretend Play bundle is everything we hang up and set out — seventy pages of banners, signs, menus and price tags. Print it, laminate what you can, and let them run the patch. You never have to leave the house or make the thirty-minute drive to the real one; on the weeks we do not, this is the patch. It is the most learning I have ever gotten out of a roll of tape.

It is the most learning I have ever gotten out of a roll of tape.

Here’s to a month that smells like cinnamon and looks nothing like a classroom.

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