Exploring Pumpkins

I set out some areas to look closer at pumpkins, gourds and apples since these are things we are seeing a lot of at this time of year! The kids started exploring and documenting what they noticed right away!

We had a review on what an observational drawing or documentation of what an object looks like.  They looked very close at the apples and noticed many small details such as small dots and more than one color.

This group loves measuring!

It was finally time to open up our pumpkins.  I got our science table ready!

We read this book which gave us some very interesting information!  We were trying to guess how to tell which pumpkin had the  most seeds!  They all thought the bigger the pumpkin, the more seeds it would have.  This book taught us that the more lines on a pumpkin, the more seeds it will have.  There is a row of seeds for each line! The more lines, the longer it has been on the vine.

Of course that meant we needed to count the lines on our pumpkins!

Our biggest pumpkin had the most lines on it.  With this research in mind, the kids predicted which pumpkin would have the most seeds.  When we collected the data, it was interesting to see that not all of them thought the research was true!  We would have to prove it!

We had also been wondering what color the inside of the white pumpkin was.  The kids picked three colors that they thought it would most likely be and we collected data to find out what we thought.

It ended up being yellow!

I couldn't get the top of of this pumpkin so they all used their muscles to hold the bottom down for me.

Before we started taking the insides out, I gave the kids time to explore and look closer.

After that, they dug in!  They were not squeamish at all!  They were literally up to their elbows in pumpkin goo!  They got to work separating the seeds from the pulp and then just played with the pulp as if it were play dough.

We had voted on the facial features of our jack-o-lantern.  I was getting ready to draw the shapes when some kids stopped me and said they wanted to draw them...so I gave them the marker and they took turns each drawing a part of the face. 

It turned out way cuter than if I would have drawn it! I love how the eyes are different sizes!

Here a friend is pretending our jack-o-lantern is eating him!

We dried out the seeds and noticed that what the book told us was true!  Our pumpkin that had the most lines on it had the most seeds.  Now it was time to count them.

I turned the science table into a math table!  

First they looked at what 100 looks like by looking at the chart.  Than they looked at the seeds on the tray and guessed how many seeds that pumpkin had.  Most guessed 100.

The kids filled the 100 chart with seeds and then put the 100 seeds in a cup.  After we get each pumpkins seeds counted into the groups of 100, we will see exactly how many seeds were in each pumpkin.  This was helping the kids with counting objects and counting by 10's.  Before they put the seeds in the cup they counted them by tens on the one hundred chart.

We are not finished counting the seeds yet!  We will work on finishing that on Monday!