Teach Early Literacy with Free Pumpkin Book Printables

With autumn and Halloween quickly approaching, it’s time to celebrate the fun of pumpkins. These free pumpkin book printables teach color recognition, letter tracing, and loads of pre-reading skills. They are both kid and teacher-approved, and make the perfect addition to the rest of your fall activities for preschoolers.

Don’t miss grabbing the free printable booklet at the end of the post! We also include lots of ideas for how to use it in alternate ways.

This pumpkin colors booklet, and accompanying class book, is the perfect thematic way to teach color recognition to preschoolers and kindergarteners.

They’re also practicing color sorting and counting while working on emergent reading skills. With just one printable, children can color, read, and practice several math skills all while enjoying a favorite topic…pumpkins!

We like to use these in circle time and in our fall writing center. If you’re looking to amp up your pumpkin preschool theme, try out this Apples & Pumpkins Preschool Centers!

Why Free Printable Booklets

I love these free pumpkin booklets for so many reasons! Not only are they fun pumpkins to color, (so they can be used like free pumpkin coloring pages), but they teach so many important skills! Here are a few:

• color recognition
• tracing skills
• letter-sound correspondence
• left to right progression

Pumpkin Book Printable

This free pumpkin book printable is all about pumkin colors! Using a single printable, kids can color, read, and engage in various math activities, all while having fun with a beloved subject – pumpkins!

What’s Included

With this freebie, you get more than just a booklet of pumpkins to color. You also get a full page, full color version to create an 8.5×11 inch class version, too! I love reading the big version to my students at circle time.

Additional Materials

• yarn (to assemble class book)
• markers or crayons
• color counters (for optional math extension)

Making the Pumpkin Early Reader Booklet

I wanted the biggest pumpkin book to hold up over time, so I printed out each page full size and in color at my local print shop. I also laminated the pages for extra durability. The book was assembled by hole punching the pages and tying the whole thing together with some yarn.

The individual books are meant to be colored in, so I printed those in black and white and two to a page. I cut the pages in half, organized them into rainbow order, and then stapled them to make a booklet.

20+ Hands-on Pumpkin Activities for Preschool

Reading the Colors Book

After we read the large book together as a class, I presented each student with their own book and a set of markers. They quickly got to work coloring in the pumpkins.

While I was available to help, should they ask, the class quickly figured out that they could use the big class version of the book as a reference. Most of them can’t read color words yet, but they can match many words by the way they look and their beginning letter.

That’s the strategy many of them used here. When they turned to a new page in their booklet, they looked for the same page in the big book. They knew they had found the matching page when they saw that the words matched.

After coloring came my favorite part – reading the books! Because of the repetitive text, the book is predictable, making it easy for young readers to “read” to themselves or out loud. I pulled many students aside and had them read their books to me.

This was also an easy way to informally assess your preschooler’s color recognition skills.

Pumpkin Booklets

That was the end of my pumpkin book plans, but as often happens, the kids were so excited about the color books that we came up with so many uses for it! I love it when learning is child-led and just naturally flows.

Using a set of color counters, we practiced some color matching and sorting activities using the full color big book. As a result of many activities like this one, many students counted the “pumpkins” (counters) as they placed them on the pumpkin in the book.

You could easily add dice and transform it into a counting activity, or get creative and use real pumpkin seeds instead of counters!

Then, I decided to add the laminated pages to our pumpkin fine motor activities. My preschoolers smooshed in the correct color of playdough to cover the pumpkin. Playdough is always a staple in my classroom and home!

It seems like most preschoolers love fall and all its fun activities, and my kids absolutely adored these pumpkin emergent readers! We’ll be pulling them out several times during the season for math and literacy practice.

And of course, you can push those counters into the playdough, too. This can be extra color matching practice, fine motor practice, and counting, too!

Pumpkin Books for Preschool

This fall pumpkin printable is a natural tie in to other pumpkin picture books! We love reading one or two a day during a pumpkin theme, or scattered throughout the fall season. Seeing them all on my shelf always makes me feel like I’m sitting in a pumpkin patch!

Free Pumpkin Book Printables

While our color recognition and word tracing pumpkin book is our favorite, here are some other printable pumpkins booklets we also love.

• Life Cycle of a Pumpkin Book
• Pumpkin Seed Counting Booklet
• My Pumpkin Fold Book

Get Your Pumpkin Colors Book Here

Think these printable pumpkin color booklet will fit in well with your pumpkin theme preschool lesson plans? Grab them below!