Pumpkins Everywhere!

Pumpkins Everywhere

Isn't that the truth!

All the munchkins brought in a pumpkin of choice for many of the activities of this fun fall unit.  It's always such a fantastic way to explore classifying & sorting, math measurement concepts and science life cycles. What a perfect assortment we had this year...from HUGE to small, short to tall, bumpy to smooth, and all sorts of colors!  We even ended up with a rotten one before the unit was over!

Scientific Thinkers!

We spent several different days sorting our pumpkins in all the different ways, while creating all kinds of graphs to show our results, too.   

Sorting...long stem, short stem, no stem!

 Hey, that's Miss D, our fantastic student teacher!

Graphing...small, medium, big

 

Converting our floor graph to a chart graph.

And then transferring our data!

 Then Miss D had the munchkins learning all about circumference by creating "belts" for their pumpkins.  The munchkins estimated the circumference, predicted if their estimation was too big or too small, and then actually measured the true circumference of their pumpkin.  It was lots of work, but our little scientists did a great job and came away with some great measurement skills and some new vocabulary to boot!

The Cycle of Life

This was a great unit to revisit what we know about plant life cycles and the beauty of God's hand in all of nature.  We took several opportunities to explore this...from sequencing card games, to ordering the stages of growth, to reading about the life cycle, to writing our own complete "pumpkin story ".  The munchkins did it all!

Much More...

We had lots of other fun with pumpkins and found them everywhere around our room!  There were lots of reading opportunities...

Like the pumpkin patch of words we know...

 And the pumpkin stories we read and made to take home.

And, of Course, Baking...

We can never get through a unit without a recipe (or in this case...two!)

Like mini pumpkin pies!

Pouring ingredients...

Mixing the filling...

Making graham cracker crust...

Finished!

Not too bad!

But then there was the recipe that mixed food with a story and song!

Five Little Pumpkins!

Ours were sitting on a "cookie" gate and as we read the book and sang the song, our pumpkins rolled away (into our stomachs, of course!).

And who can resist just a few more pictures of our munchkins hard at work throughout the last few week, whether it be reading, writing, counting or just plain having fun!

I supposed the best part of our unit (besides the food!) was putting the faces on our pumpkin friends.  We liked them so much, we decided to name them and write stories about them.  Yes...each munchkin wrote a 3 sentence story about his or her new friend.  What fantastic kindergarten writers!

 We were sad to see it end, but just as October was fading away, we knew it was time to harvest all the pumpkins (and take them home before any more ended up rotten!)  And so our classroom went from "pumpkins everywhere" to "pumpkins nowhere"...but...I hear we should be on the lookout for turkeys!

Until next time,

Giggles,

Mrs. D.