Pumpkin Pumpkin

Our class has been learning facts about pumpkins and how they grow. Students took notes in their science data notebooks while I charted the facts we found in the books: "Seed, Sprout, Pumpkin Pie" by Jill Eaton and "The Pumpkin Book" by Gail Gibbons. 

Student Science Data Notebook:

 

We read "The Very Best Pumpkin" and charted all the fancy words we did not know. The kids were inferring what these words meant by using their schema and context clues!

 This week our class did pumpkin math! We had a large pumpkin and a tiny pumpkin to examine and explore. Before we started experimenting the kids broke out their science journals and made predictions about our pumpkins! We predicted if our pumpkins would sink or float, how much our pumpkins would weigh, how many cubes tall our pumpkins would be, how many seams our pumpkins would have, and how many seeds would be inside our pumpkins! Then we split the kids in two groups to explore!

 

We used this cute pumpkin math recording sheet I found on pinterest!

It was a blast! We used a scale to weigh the pumpkins. Our small pumpkin weighed less than 1 lb.! Our large pumpkin weighed 17 lbs! We used cubes to measure how tall our pumpkins were.

 We used string to measure the pumpkin's circumference.

 We dug out handfuls of seeds!

 We put 10 seeds in each cup and stacked 10 cups up to make towers of 100.

 

Our small pumpkin group

Our large pumpkin group