Charlie Brown’s Great Pumpkin Bowling Game

We are super excited to be participating in Halloween Read and Play – a multi-blog event the combines Halloween activities with Halloween books. You know we love books and we love to create fun activities to go along with the books we are reading. 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.

Charlie Brown Great Pumpkin Bowling Game

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. 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/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.

This post is part of an AWESOME Halloween Read and Play Blog Hop.
Make sure to check out the other book based activities from fantastic bloggers!

Play Would You Rather Halloween Edition!