Fall Wagon Word Building Pumpkins – Free Printables!
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These fun fall-themed printables are totally free! Use the printable pumpkins with letters and digraphs written on them to build words on a wagon!
Why We Love It
Take a trip to the pumpkin patch with these Fall word wagon free printables. Get pumpkin letters, digraphs, and blank cards to totally customize this for your students!
This activity is hands-on and visually engaging, making it especially effective for young learners developing their phonemic awareness and blending skills.
It’s a great way to reinforce letter-sound relationships in an engaging, multi-sensory, seasonal context!
Read about the many ways to use this resource with your students, then download the freebies for free below!
About the Printables
What you get (in color and black/white versions!):
- Letters A-Z on pumpkins
- Digraphs sh, ch, -ck, wh, ph on pumpkins
- Blank pumpkins
- Wagon for building words
👉 This resource was designed to be best suited for students in Kindergarten through 2nd grade.
👉 Want more? Get our Elkonin Boxes/Sound Boxes for 3, 4, and 5 phoneme words and learn how they help students with lots of important reading skills!
Ways To Use It
👉 Word Building
Dictate a word out loud. Use our phonics word lists to make it easy! Have students find and place the pumpkins in the correct order on the wagon to create the word, then read the word out loud.
👉 Connect Phonemes & Graphemes
If you’re working on sounds, give students a few pumpkins at a time, then call out the sound.
Say, “Find the letter that says /m/.” Then students hold up the letter that spells that sound!
👉 Sort the Pumpkins
Have students separate the pumpkins into piles of consonants and vowels.
👉 Change One Letter
Phoneme manipulation is an important phonological awareness skill! Dictate a word, then ask students to change just one phoneme at a time. This is very similar to word chaining.
Say, “Build the word “pat.” Now change the /a/ to /e/. What word do we have now?” Kids should respond “pet.” Use our word ladders resource for more no-prep practice like this!
👉 Write the Letter
Laminate the blank pumpkins using dry-erase laminating sheets (they wipe clean like magic!), then give each kid a dry erase marker.
Say a letter or sound out loud, and have the children write the letter on the pumpkin and place it on the wagon. Keep placing letters one on top of the other and keep track of how many they can get right in a row!
👉 Alphabetical Order
Mix up the pumpkins. In a large area, have children spread out the pumpkins and try to place them in alphabetical order!
Engage more senses with this activity by having them sing the ABC’s as they do it. Get our alphabet arcs for more practice.
Expert Tips
Easily Differentiate this resource: You can start simple and add more complex concepts as your students master them. Some examples:
- Start with just one middle vowel and add more as students learn them.
- Begin to add more phonemes to simple words by dictating words with blends and incorporate morphology with early readers by adding suffix -s to CVC words.
- Use the included digraph cards to have students build words with beginning and ending digraphs.
- Use the blank cards for any writing in additional phonics concepts like r-controlled vowels or morphology concepts like prefixes un- or re-, or suffixes -ing or –ed.
🍁 More Fall Freebies
- Consonant Blends Roll & Write
- Short Vowel Pumpkin Practice
- Fluency Turkey for all Phonics Skills
- Pumpkin Magnet Letter Mat
Download & Print
DOWNLOAD TERMS: All of our resources and printables are designed for personal use only in homes and classrooms. Each teacher must download his or her own copy. You may not: Save our files to a shared drive, reproduce our resources on the web, or make photocopies for anyone besides your own students. To share with others, please use the social share links provided or distribute the link to the blog post so others can download their own copies. Your support in this allows us to keep making free resources for everyone! Please see our Creative Credits page for information about the licensed clipart we use. If you have any questions or concerns regarding our terms, please email us. Thank you!
👉 More Word Building FREEBIES: Grow a garden with spring flowers word building, or pile snowballs on a sled to celebrate winter!
This is so cute! You guys have the best ideas and so generous to share with everyone!😊
Hi Justina,
Thank you for the kind words! We love creating resources that make learning fun, and we’re so glad we can share them with so many educators and parents.
Katie and Laura