Pumpkins!

All week we learned about pumpkins! We read the book Pumpkin Circle: The story of a garden by George Levenson, photography by Shmuel Thaler and then talked about the life cycle of a pumpkin.  I really like this book because it is a Non-fiction book, but students enjoy the text and are able to relate to it easily.  Plus, it's keeps them engaged.  The students sequenced the life cycle after this. 

Our Scholastic News for this week tied in great with this mini unit.  We were able to learn more vocabulary words that went along with the life cycle of a pumpkin. 

The students were very excited about this weeks science focus so I asked them what they wanted to do next.  Their answer "carve a pumpkin!"  The next best thing to this, in my opinion...and more educational...we would disect a pumpkin!  So on Wednesday we hypothesized what would be in the pumpkin and then we tested our theories!  The students used their 4 senses (I didn't think eating the goop was a good idea, as it wasn't cooked) as we disected and investigated the pumpkin.  Each table was given a handfull of "pumpkin goop" and magnifying glasses and we made observations about what we saw.  Before we cleaned up, each table split up the pumpkin seeds and each student was responsible for counting seeds.  After everyone counted, we added them up.  Our SMALL pumpkin had 449 seeds!  I was amazed at how many seeds it had, especially since it was only about a 2 lb pumpkin!  The students each took home a few seeds to try to grow their own pumpkins.