Pumpkin Math

On Thursday, we got a little festive! This week we had learned about pumpkins. We learned about the life cycle of a pumpkin and read a great book called Pumpkin Jack. In the story, a boy's Jack O Lantern is left outside after Halloween and then new pumpkins grow the next year from his seeds that were covered with the fall leaves, winter snow, and ended up planted by accident.

We read lots of books about pumpkins and talked about how they grow and what we do with them. On Wednesday we cut out pictures of the different stages in the pumpkin life cycle and put them in order from seed all the way to pumpkin pie.

Friday I brought in a pumpkin and we had a little science/social studies/math lesson.

To incorporate science, we used our senses. We smelled the pumpkin and then I asked the kids to each come up and pull out some of its insides...




They all decided that it felt mushy and gooey! What a fun thing to test out!

Then we started getting out all of the seeds. I am going to bake them for the kids so we can taste them and then I am trying to persuade Mr. Tucker to plant a few in his garden so we will have pumpkins for our class next year, just like Pumpkin Jack!

Now to incorporate math, we did a little estimation. I asked the kids to estimate how many seeds we were able to pull out of our pumpkin.

We had a lot of guesses. Most of them were above 100, which was a good guess and great thinking because we have not even covered numbers that high yet! They all knew that there were MANY more than 10, which is what we have been working on. To count, I started by having each child come and count 10 seeds into the bag. This reinforced the concepts of one to one correspondence that we have been working on in Math. The goal was to count them all in and then see how our estimates measured up. However, in addition to our 10 hand fulls began to get put in so we didn't quite get to figure it out. I do know that there were at least 120 in the bag after each child put their 10 in and then there were QUITE a few left over!!

Finally to incorporate social studies, we made our pumpkin into a jack o' lantern. With Halloween coming up we will begin next week to look at the traditions associated with that holiday. We decided on using shapes to make our pumpkin's face. We used triangles for eyes, a circle for a nose, and a trapezoid for the mouth.

Who knew math, science, and social studies could be so fun?!