All About Pumpkins

In preparation for our field trip on Friday, we focused all of our attention on pumpkins.  We introduced our unit of study with the book Pumpkin, Pumpkin by Jeanne Titherington.

Through beautiful expression and detailed illustrations, this book taught the life cycle of the pumpkin and how each step of the cycle occurs in sequence.  As a class, we recorded the life cycle of a pumpkin step by step based on the story by Titherington.

I then illustrated the cycle so that the students were able to see that a cycle is continuous - the seeds will continue to grow and the pumpkins will continue to be picked.

We made our own pumpkins in class that included the life cycle sequence hanging on a pumpkin vine - seed, sprout, plant (vine), flower, green pumpkin, orange pumpkin.

The most exciting lesson from our unit involved a real pumpkin - and a BIG one at that.  We observed our pumpkin - touched it, picked it up, rolled it around.

 
Based on our observations, we made predictions about whether or not our pumpkin would sink or float.  We also estimated how many seeds we thought were inside.

• Out of 15 students - 10 thought it would sink, 5 thought it would float
• The seed estimations ranged from 5 seeds to over 1 million seeds.

Did our pumpkin sink or float?

How many seeds did we count?

 Our final results?  The pumpkin floated and we counted 652 seeds inside of the pumpkin!

We went to Thompson Farm prepared to share our knowledge of pumpkins!  Pictures from our field trip to follow!