You guys, we finally started our pumpkin unit!! I am so excited because in my mind it means that the holidays are coming! Yesterday we started our unit with a KWL chart. Our kids had great schema about pumpkins, but were so excited to learn more. We listened to Life Cycle of a Pumpkin in our basal reader. Yay for good nonfiction text!
Today we reread the story for fluency, and really dug deeper into the text. Today was also our fun pumpkin investigation day! We sent a note home asking students to bring a pumpkin to school, in hopes of getting 15 so that our kids could work in groups of 3 {remember, I team teach, so we have 45 kiddos!}. Well, we got enough pumpkins to have a mini pumpkin patch in our classroom. Our families rock! So our students were able to work in pairs, which made for happier teachers :) I love the variety they brought.
To conduct our investigation, we used this freebie from my little store! Can you tell this is from my early TpT days??! :)
Students had to make estimates/predictions before they began. There were 5 stations in all. They counted the lines on their pumpkins, weighed their pumpkins, measured the circumference, measured how tall their pumpkin was, and found out if a pumpkin sinks or floats. Our awesome Watch D.O.G. helped out with the sink or float station :) I looooved seeing how surprised some of them were to learn that a pumpkin floats! Here are some pics from The Great Pumpkin Investigation!
This afternoon we put a pumpkin at each table. Students used their senses to come up with adjectives to describe the outside of a pumpkin. There were some great discussions going on! I think our kids are really understanding adjectives, PTL!
Then... drumroll please...We. Opened. The. Pumpkins! And they got to observe the inside! As in they got to TOUCH the inside. Say what?! It was better than Christmas morning! At least they sounded that excited.
Again, they came up with adjectives to describe the inside of a pumpkin. We made this anchor chart {which will come in handy next week with our inside/outside craftivity!}
The last thing we did today was compare pumpkins to apples. We set out a real pumpkin and a real apple to help them out.
We filled out this venn diagram together. Please excuse the scribble on my chart. Anyone who knows me knows that it really, really bugged me and I really, really wanted to whip up a new anchor chart. But, there was no time. Our kids did an amazing job comparing and contrasting pumpkins and apples!
We ran out of time, so tomorrow I am having the kids fill out their own pumpkin and apple venn diagram from my Fun with Pumpkins! pack!
I will be posting some more about pumpkins sometime in the next week or so, so be on the look out! We will use lots of activities from the pack below!
Happy hump day! We are halfway done!
thank's for your information and i like your post
ReplyDelete