We gathered materials. We actually borrowed them from one of our amazing ECE's at our school who is always prepared with the best stuff ! :)
We got into our groups and the teachers job was to cut of the top! Then it was game on! The kids took turns ripping out the insides, with spoons, scoops and their bare hands. Some of them weren't into using their hands (which we guessed) but most of them were.
Next we sorted the seeds from the guts (real technical lingo I'm using here, I know.) We counted the seeds. We had four pumpkins but as a whole class we focused our investigation on one pumpkin in particular. This was the pumpkin who's seeds we counted. 407! 407 seeds!!! It took a while-but we got there.
The children made guesses on how many seeds they thought the pumpkin would have-and then we talked about how many it actually had. We discussed reasonable guesses, and that a guess of "one million seeds" in a medium sized pumpkin was not probable.
Next-in their small groups they got to plan what kind of jack-o-lantern they wanted to carve. They had to agree and it had to be a team effort. They drew their faces, and we carved.
All four of the pumpkins looked different from one another! While we were busy carving the designs-I decided to try something new. I asked one boy in our class if he would take some photos of stuff he thought was important. Here is what he captured.
He took 63 pictures! All of the other one's had children's faces in them so I couldn't use them but it really got me thinking about letting the children use my camera more often. He loved being picked to take pictures-and he was very proud of his work. They see me with a camera in my hand for 90 percent of the day-so I suppose that looks like fun!
In the last picture-he caught me-trying to take a picture using my phone's camera-so I would have a photo of him capturing all the investigating!
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