Pumpkin Fun!

This week was Red Ribbon Rally week! We had so many activities planned for this week planned for that, I decided to use this week as a review week and an end to our P/Pumpkin week! Therefore, we decided to have a fun day with pumpkins! My students loved every minute of it! We mixed science, math, sensory, fine motors and literature into our pumpkin activities.

One group observed the pumpkins by using their five senses: (used an observation sheet from http://www.2teachingmommies.com/)
 *We looked at the outside and the inside of our pumpkin and drew a picture of each.
 *We smelled the inside!  Some students thought it smelled like wonderful flowers while others thought it smelled more like a skunk!
 *We touched the pumpkin and had to decide if it was bumpy or smooth or soft or hard.
 *We tasted baked seeds and had to decide if it was salty, sour, or sweet.
 *We even listened to our pumpkin to see if it made noise!

Another group measured our pumpkin!  First, they estimated how many cubes tall they thought our class pumpkin was.  Then they measured the pumpkin with their cubes to see who's guess was the closest.  Our pumpkin was 18 cubes tall!!!! Wow! What a big pumpkin!  During this group, they also estimated how many seeds they thought our pumpkin had in it.

They reached inside the pumpkin and pulled out as many seeds as they could! The facial expressions were priceless! You would have thought these students have never carved a pumpkin before!

My last group was my alone group.  The students colored, cut out, and put in order a book about a pumpkin's lifestyle!

To end our pumpkin unit, we sorted small pumpkins by the height of their stem. (The students received these pumpkins from a local pumpkin patch during a field trip.)  They have talked me into letting them paint these pumpkins now, so I plan on having some pumpkin face painting next week!

We added to this theme this year by allowing the students to pick pumpkin seeds out to count.  We had a competition on how many each student could scoop out until they were all gone.  Most students loved getting the guts out! They then took the guts to the table to sort out the seeds from the guts.  They put their seeds into a baggie with their name on it.  The next day we sat in a circle and took turns counting  our seeds.  (We used two days for this with our short attention spans.)  We then used technology and had our students type in their amount on a calculator!