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October is the perfect time to start exploring pumpkins! Too bad you can’t include Pumpkin Spice Lattes in your activities. But, we had blast exploring pumpkins anyways! This Applicious Teacher worked to bring pumpkins into our reading, writing, AND science lessons this week! Here’s a peek at our pumpkin activities for the week!
Pumpkin Reading
We started our week off with reading the CCSS exemplar text, “From Seed to Pumpkin”.
Then, we worked on some sequencing with the life cycle of a pumpkin using these interactive pieces from this Fall Centers pack.
The kids used our model to complete an adorable activity from Babbling Abby in their Reading Response journals! Did I mention it’s free in her store? Go snag it here!
I love to fill my library with books about our theme for the week. Here’s some of the books I KNEW my kids would love to read as we learned more about those large orange gourds!
After learning so much about pumpkins we HAD to share our new found knowledge. So, we created a pumpkin tree chart!
Pumpkin Writing
With all this learning and reading about Pumpkins, we had to work to write about them! We are working on expository writing, so I thought it’d be great for the students to write the steps for carving a pumpkin. But, of course we had to ACTUALLY carve a pumpkin to see what those steps were! You can’t teach about pumpkins and NOT carve one, right? Right…!
So… yours truly rolled up her sleeves and carved a pumpkin with a very simple face. (No judging!) As we carved the pumpkin, we brainstormed the steps and wrote them on a chart for later. You can’t just carve a pumpkin in class and expect not to do ANYTHING with it! I also had the kids help me scoop out all the guts! It got a little messy to say the least, but the students were soooo engaged!
On the back, we wrote the steps. Super easy to remember because we wrote them down the previous day! I worked to model for my students how to turn the numbered steps into an actual paragraph.
Pumpkin Math and Science
On Friday, I had a few parents come in to help. We covered the desks with newspaper and split the students into 5 groups. Each group got a pumpkin to “explore”. First, we weighed the pumpkins to see which one was heaviest. Then, we checked to see if the pumpkins would sink or float. Guess what?! Pumpkins float! We also checked the circumference of each pumpkin to see which one was the biggest.
Finally, we were ready to explore the inside of the pumpkins! I had my parent volunteers carefully cut a hole in the of the pumpkins.
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