October {THROWBACK}: Pumpkins

Oh, October...how I love thee! You are filled with cooler weather, boots, scarves, sweaters, and Pumpkin Spice lattes. Nothing could be more perfect. 

 

We even decorate the hall with your goodness to celebrate your arrival.

 

 Aside from all of those wonderful things, I bring you a hodge podge of October posts from last year.

 

This year, we have a new scope and sequence to follow.  So, many of these fun activities I will be parting with, but had to revisit them to share the fun I had last year with you...in hopes that you may take something away!

 

The first October throwback post is dedicated to the pumpkins!

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Kids just L-O-V-E using magazines in the classroom! We've been working on identifying nouns, so what a greater way to incorporate the two than this little activity?

 

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

 

Our nouns pumpkins grace our hallway like a pumpkin patch!

 

We read The Pumpkin Book to learn some facts about pumpkins and recorded our learning on our 'can/have/are' chart.

{Yes, my pumpkin may look more like an apple. "So what, who cares!?"}

 

We studied all about the life cycle of a pumpkin.  We first read From Seed to Pumpkin and then sequenced the steps using pictures from {here} and sentences I typed up to match them. I saw this idea on Cara's blog and just had to do it with my firsties this year. Great way to reinforce what the book talks about!

 

 

 

We filled out a life cycle diagram for each step of the pumpkin's life cycle.

 

 

 

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

 

We've been trying really hard to write our sentences using correct grammar.  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 the freebie!

 

 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.

 

 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 grouped the seeds into sets of 10.  Putting them all to work, 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 measured how tall the pumpkin was with cubes.

 

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

It can be found {here}.

 

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Hope you enjoyed the pumpkiny goodness of this post. Be on the lookout for a bats gone wild post soon!