DIY Charlie Brown's Great Pumpkin Bowling Game

You know we love books and we love to create fun activities to go along with the books we are reading. We also love creating super cool Halloween crafts and activities for kids. This activity combines both books and cool activities! One of my favourite, classic Halloween books is “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” by Charles M. Shultz. After reading the book with my girls recently I was inspired to make a fun Charlie Brown great pumpkin bowling game. What could be more fun then knocking over Charlie Brown and his friends with the great pumpkin – okay, a gourd.

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Charlie Brown Great Pumpkin Bowling Game

You will need

5 toilet paper rolls
construction paper – red, yellow, black, white, pink and blue
black marker
tape
scissors
pencil and paper

First, we did a little planning. We took a look at our favourite characters from the book – Charlie, Lucy, Sally, Linus and Snoopy. We thought about what the key characteristics of these kids are.

Charlie’s yellow and brown zig-zag
Sally’s pink with polka dots
Lucy’s blue and ruffle trim
Linus’ stripes
Snoopy’s big floppy ears

Then we got down to planning how we could make simple representations of the characters with toilet paper rolls.

I used construction paper to cover the rolls and bring them to life. FYI a standard toilet paper roll is 10 cm high and can be wrapped easily with anything 16 cm long. Once we had our plan, our dimensions and our construction paper it was a quick and easy job to make the whole gang. How fun are these guys?!

We happened to have a small pumpkin or a festive bowling ball gourd that was perfect for our game. My daughter set up the “pins” and decided on a scoring system for the match. Knocking over different people resulted in different points being assigned…Snoopy was worth the most. Let the fun begin!

This was such a simple way to extend the book into play. Of course, once the bowling was done the characters were instantly incorporated into my daughter’s small world play. Even at 8 years of age, she can spend hours playing with little people and creating incredible worlds with her imagination. Charlie and the gang fit in perfectly.