We began our pumpkin unit by reading the Gail Gibbons book Pumpkins. Then we followed this by making a simple prediction on whether cold or hot water would make our candy devolve faster. You can see the students' predictions above. The hot water melted the coating faster, below is a picture of the candies after a few minutes. The hot water plate had almost all of the coating dissolved.
Unfortunately I didn't take any photos of the activities we did for our pumpkin investigation booklet. The booklet had us measuring our pumpkins and labeling the life cycle. It also had us voting on whether we liked pumpkin pie and commenting on the taste of raw pumpkin.
For our class craft we answered questions about Halloween to decide what our jack-o-lanterns would look like. They look great decorating our hallway.
We finished our unit up on Friday. Students estimated how many seeds were in our big pumpkin by writing their estimates on sticky notes. The estimates ranged from 11 to 120.
To find out the answer to our seed question we had to cut the pumpkin open.
After cutting open the pumpkin it was time to scoop out all of the seeds so that we could count them.
After scooping out all of the seeds students counted them into piles of ten. Then Mrs. Mills and I counted up the piles and came to the conclusion that the big pumpkin had about 420 seeds inside of it. Miss KyLee had the closest estimation at 120.
We took some of the seeds and planted them in cups to see if they would grow. We also put seeds in plastic baggies with damp paper towels and hung them in the window. We hope to watch them sprout.
Our final prediction of the week was about whether pumpkins sink or float. Students who are standing are predicting float and those kneeling are predicting sink. The answer is pumpkins float just like our apples did last month.
