Pumpkins, Pumpkins and MORE Pumpkins!

Today we learned about pumpkins, and, in fact, started an inquiry on everything "jack-o-lantern." It all started last week when some students noticed that we had put out word cards at the writing table. A few students really enjoyed writing "jack-o-lantern" or drawing a picture of their own jack-o-lantern. After this, we watched a short movie on Shapes and Pumpkins with Thomas the Train and added some stencils to our writing and creative centre with Halloween shapes.

It was the day to take complete advantage of jack-o-lanterns, however! Mrs. Saini read us a story about how pumpkins grow in the morning. Soon after we decided to measure our pumpkins. First we thought of all the ways we could measure pumpkins (how tall, how heavy, with our hands, with a scale, with a measure, with our bodies), and then we drew a picture of how we were going to measure them and began!

Diligently measured the pumpkin, then drawing a picture to record it!

 Many students used tape measures, rulers and the scale to see how they could measure the pumpkins. Often times it involved teamwork as students had to have someone help them to measure the circumference of the pumpkins. After we measured, we recorded our information on a paper by drawing a picture and doing our best job to write what we used to measure.

There were a few disagreements about what pumpkin was bigger, but in the end, it didn't matter because we all had fun exploring measurement.

After we were all done measuring, I got a carving knife and we decided to see what was inside. Our guesses were: seeds, slime, baby pumpkin, candy, orange, brown and nothing. When we opened it up we saw...

Princess and pumpkin guts!

Lots of seeds and pumpkin guts! Anyone who wanted a turn got to scoop out some of the pumpkin. Our students all felt that the insides were smooth, slippery and slimy. They certainly had fun exploring the feel of the pumpkin between their fingers.

At this point, a few friends were curious about the seeds. They asked questions like, "If we bring this home and plant it, what will happen?" and "Can you eat these?". While the first was a great question, there are few green thumbs in our class (nor the light for growing a plant in the midst of a cold windstorm), so we decided to see if we could eat them. I explained that you can eat the seeds, but you need to separate the seeds from the pumpkin "guts" first, and then cook them.

We quickly started separating!

Our red seed bowl was behind the cauldron. They did a great job! Mrs. Walt helped out by bringing them home, washing them of all their germs and marinating them in olive oil and salt.

We decided that we would cook them tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, many students were asking what our jack-o-lantern would look like and were coming up with designs.

Ohhhh! So scary!

Whose design will win for our two pumpkins? Find out tomorrow when we carve them to get ready for our spooky Halloween party on Wednesday!