Pumpkin Time!

       What a busy week we have had so far! This week we learnt all about pumpkins. In Grade One we learnt about the life cycle of a pumpkin and made a life cycle book, we learnt about how the pumpkin became a symbol for Halloween, we did pumpkin writing and we even did some skip counting by 2's games with pumpkins. In Grade Two we also learnt about the pumpkin life cycle however, we wrote a recount writing piece as our follow up. We wrote about how the pumpkin goes from seed to the spooky jack-o-lanterns we see on our front porches every Halloween.We also played some skip counting games (by 2's, 5's and 10's) with pumpkins on the smart board.
       Today we did some pumpkin carving. I was very nervous for this class activity. The helper that I had arranged to come in had to reschedule so it was just me, 14 kiddos and 4 pumpkins. I was a little worried about this activity. However, the kids did so well. I told them I was going to be very strict today during pumpkin carving time (Owen asked me if I was going to be Art class strict or really strict like when we use the laptops!). The kids really worked well together. We made mixed groups of Grade 2's and Grade 1's and I put them right to work.
       The first thing the kids had to do was to empty out the pulp and the seeds from our pumpkins. I was very surprised as our girls dug right in. Our boys thought it was disgusting and needed a bit of encouragement to grab a handful of "pumpkin slime". Below are a few pictures of the kiddos emptying out their pumpkins.

 

 

      Once the pulp and the seeds were out, I had the kids count their pumpkin seeds. Yesterday we read a book that said every pumpkin, on average, has about 500 seeds inside. We wanted to see if this was true. I had the kids brainstorm how they would count their seeds. Some kids wanted to count each seed, some kids suggested we count by 2's, 5's and 10's. We talked about which way would be the best way to count our seeds. Sydney, Amelie and Brooke suggested that we count our seeds by 10's. They thought that if we make little groups of ten pumpkin seeds, then it would be easier to count them. Way to synergize girls!

 

Sydney, Brooke and Amelie made groups of 10 and then counted their seeds. It worked so well that all the groups gave it a go!



        Well our pumpkins had a lot of seeds. Group 1 had 510 seeds, Group 2 had 501 seeds, Group 3 had 117 seeds and Group 4 had 411 seeds. We don't know what happened to Group 3's pumpkin-they were a little disappointed about the lack of seeds.
        After emptying out the pumpkins, we used tally marks and voted on what types of faces to draw on each pumpkin. The Grade 1's drew the faces and the Grade 2's carved with me (one on one, no knives just a kid friendly carving set). Our masterpieces were finished, but the kids were not.
        The kids are funny in that they know if we do something super fun, they will have to do some hard work about what they did afterwards. When we finished the pumpkins, I got a lot of "OK now what?" looks from our kids. They are too smart for their own good. The One's wrote about our pumpkin carving time and the Grade 2's were then introduced to procedural writing. What a day! I am beat but the kids had tons of fun while learning so it was all worth it!

Mrs. Ashley Daley-Creamer