Pumpkin Science!

Free slideshow created with Smilebox

5 Little Pumpkins Sitting on A Gate

Our poem of the week was 5 Little Pumpkins sitting on a gate. We circled our sight word the and the rhyming words in the poem. On Thursday, we read the book and created a TLC illustration. Then the students circled the and the rhyming words in thier own copy of the poem.

Pumpkin Math

In honor of letter p, we brought pumpkins to school and used them to learn about measurement. We used link cubes to measure the height of our pumpkins and used string to measure the circumference of our pumpkins. we also used paper pumpkins to measure ourselves to find out how many pumpkins tall we are.

This photo slideshow created with Smilebox

Do Pumpkins Sink or Float?

We had a great time testing out this question. We thought that the big heavy pumpkin would sink, but it floated just like all the other pumpkins. We discussed that all the pumpkins float because they are hollow or empty inside.

Pumpkin Circle Map

We read The Pumpkin Book by Gail Gibbons and talked about what we know about pumpkins and where we learned it. We constructed a circle map about pumpkins and made our own pumpkins.

Life Cycle of a Pumpkin

We read Pumpkin Pumpkin and discussed the life cycle of a pumpkin. The students then made a model of the life cycle.

Inside of a Pumpkin

On Tuesday, we cut open our class pumpkin and observed the insides. While we were observing we colored and labeled the parts. Finally, we created a Parts of a Pumpkin Brace Map.

In Science, we started a new experiment with our pumpkin. We put our cut open pumpkin in a container of potting soil and put a lid on it. We made predictions as to what we thought would happen to the pumpkin over time. The students came up with some good hypothesis. The said maybe the pumpkin would rot, or shrink, or grow a new pumpkin. They drew pictures of what our pumpkin looks like now and of what they think is going to happen to our pumpkin over time. We are going to observe out pumpkin every few days and see what happens.

Pumpkin Math

To celebrate the letter P, we are learning about pumpkins. Everyone brought a pumpkin to school and we used them to do some fun math activities. On Monday we used string to measure the circumference of our pumpkins. We also weighed our pumpkins. The biggest pumpkin weighed 14lbs and the smallest pumpkin weighed 3 lbs. We compared the weight of our pumpkins to other objects and named things that weigh more and less than our pumpkins.

We used non-standard measurement to tell how many pumpkins tall we are. Everyone was either 9,10, or 11 pumpkins tall.

On Thursday we estimated how many cubes tall we thought our pumpkins were. Then we measured how tall our pumpkins were using snap cubes. The students then recorded their measurements in Our Pumpkin Discovery Book.