Harvest Festival

Tuesday evening we hosted a Harvest Festival for families and with 50 children registered, we ended up with over 70 in attendance (thank goodness we had enough supplies!) and I think everyone had a great time! We had ten different stations for little ones and had some wonderful help from our Junior Friends (students in grades 5 – 8) to help us make sure everything ran smoothly.

I love these festival-type programs because families can do as much or as little as they want and aren’t required to stay for the entire program. We ran the program for just an hour from 6:30 – 7:30pm and the families stayed for about 45 minutes for the most part and then took the kids home to get them to bed. We also were very specific in choosing are activities, staying away from more “Halloween” activities, and focusing more on fall fun!

Festival Stations

1. Which Squirrel Has the Nut
   1. The typical carnival game is where you hide a ball or in our case, an acorn, under one of three cups and you mix them around and have the person guess where the acorn is.  I used Solo cups with a clip art picture of a squirrel glued to them.
2. Leaf Craft
   1. This is a simple craft that requires leaves, Popsicle sticks, and googly eyes.  I was going to collect leaves outside, but we ended up just picking up some fake leaves from the dollar store.
3. Leaf Tic-Tac-Toe
   1. Your typical game of tic-tac-toe, but instead of x’s and o’s, we used two different types of leaves and a large piece of poster board for the tic-tac-toe board.
4. Read Aloud
   1. We had a middle school student help us with this station and she read The Ugly Pumpkin by Dave Horowitz every ten minutes throughout the hour.
5. Guess the Pumpkin’s Weight
   1. An easy station, a rather large pumpkin, and the kids can write down their guess as to how much it wears.  Our pumpkin weighed in at 7.75 lbs (but felt much heavier!)
6. Gourd Bowling
   1. We used empty water bottles with a little rice in the bottom for the pins and those bumpy round gourds for the bowling ball.
7. Find the pumpkin in the haystack
   1. We bought a small bale of hay from a local garden center and put in one of those big tubs and hide little toy pumpkins in the hay for the kids to find.
8. Candy Corn Spoon Relay
   1. This event can be done in any number of ways, most of the kids just tried to scoop as much candy corn on a spoon and move it from one bowl to another bowl a few feet away during a specific amount of time.
9. Pumpkin’ Chuckin’
   1. This was an adorable activity, but make sure you have regular-size toilet paper rolls, apparently, I buy the super, extra big ones because it was a lot harder to wrap them in the orange felt.
10. Paint Your Own Pumpkin
    1. This was the only station that required anything from the families themselves.  If they wanted to participate, they had to bring a pumpkin with them, we had all the paint and brushes.