The Great Pumpkin Investigation

Trying to fit it all in...seems impossible most days.

That's one reason why integrating across subjects is vital to fitting it all in!

We took the theme of pumpkins this week and learned about them all across the board!

Here's a little bit about our pumpkin-y kind of week!
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GRAMMAR ACTIVITY

We looked through magazines and sorted nouns into the 3 categories of person, place, and thing.
We then glued them on to our pumpkins.

Our nouns pumpkins grace our hallway like a pumpkin patch!


READING/SCIENCE ACTIVITIES
We read The Pumpkin Book to learn some facts about pumpkins
Then we recorded our learning on our 'can/have/are' chart that was shaped like a pumpkin!

We also studied how a pumpkin grows, the life cycle, while reading the book From Seed to Pumpkin.

After whole group discussion, we worked on our sequencing skills and sequenced the steps of the life cycle using pictures from {here} and sentences I typed up to match them.

We reinforced our learning by completing this life cycle chart together.

 The following day they had to apply their new pumpkin schema of the life cycle and complete this little sequencing art activity.

WRITING
We've been trying really hard to write our sentences using correct grammar and punctuation.
  I had them transfer their pictures of the pumpkin's life cycle into sentences.
This writing activity came from Oceans of First Grade Fun. 
Click on the picture for their freebie!

  

MATH/SCIENCE ACTIVITIES

 After learning a little bit about pumpkins, I brought a pumpkin to school for our pumpkin investigation! 

Words cannot explain how excited the kiddos were. Here are a few things we did during our investigation.

{I prepped this chart to hold all of our pumpkin data we observed}

 First, we examined our pumpkin and described what it looked like on the outside.

 Then, I cut the top off and we scooped out the seeds and saved them to count.

We worked on our skip counting by putting the seeds into groups of 10. 

  Putting them all to work, well this took no time at all. I had them estimate how many seeds they thought were inside. We counted by 10's to find our answer and I think we were all surprised by our number of 463!

We practice our measuring skills...

 We measured how tall the pumpkin was with cubes.

As the day went on, we recorded all of our data on our chart. 

Here is our pumpkin investigation data. The kids had their own paper to fill out.

It can be found {here}.

Fitting it all in may seem impossible at times. But it is units like these that help make it all a possibility. 

It's also SO much fun that the kids don't even realize they are hard at work!