Learning about Pumpkins in Kindergarten

I haven't had a chance to share our Kindergarten learning activities but we have been having so much fun at school. This past week we learned all about Pumpkins in our science unit. The students were absolutely floored by the fact that pumpkins are fruits versus vegetables. Starting our unit off with that one little fact had them hooked! 

We learned all about the pumpkin life cycle and made this cute little life cycle sequencing craft to show off what we learned:

I used the life cycle printable cards from A to Z Teacher Stuff

but I used them as little 3-D books that open and close.

The students also took turns coming up and putting the various stages of the pumpkin life cycle in order on a large chart to review what we had learned. 

We watched some fun (& short) videos that I thought I'd share because they were great for reviewing the different stages of the pumpkin's life cycle:

Sid Science Kid Pumpkin Investigation

Pumpkin Life Cycle

We read some great books this week that brought our unit to life via literature:

(click each book for more info via Amazon affiliate links)

 

We worked on a fall version of the 5 Little Pumpkins poem. We compared poems to stories and talked about how they are alike and different (I forgot to take a photo of our graphic organizer). We identified the rhyming word pairs in the poem and highlighted them in yellow. We found all of the number words and highlighted them in orange. We also identified the sight word "the" on our big class poem chart and drew a box around it in red. 

Then the students got to have some crafty fun while illustrating the poem with a cute paper craft. Each one was unique in their presentation and they all turned out so cute. My kindergarteners were delighted with their completed projects.

We also listened to the story Big Pumpkin.  Here's a link to a great Big Pumpkin read aloud online via youtube.  It was a wonderful way to work on the students' listening skills. After listening to the story we completed a story matrix and discussed the characters, setting, problem & solution and the lesson we learned from the story. 

We also sequenced the story - this is a great story to work on sequencing and I found some great Free Big Pumpkin printables from Kinderpillars on Teachers Pay Teachers. Then, I had the students practice retelling the story using their sequencing charts and they illustrated and shared their favorite part of the story. So much learning from one little story. 

Back to science - The students had so much fun investigating pumpkins inside and out. I brought in pumpkins in various sizes, colors and textures for the students to observe in the classroom. We cut open one large pumpkin and I let them peek inside. Then they estimated how many seeds they thought it would have and I recorded their responses on the large chart shown below. Finally, we dug in, scooped out all the seeds (yes, it got messy but I had napkins and baby wipes readily available) and counted the seeds by sorting them into groups of 10 and counting all of our groups together. It had 642 seeds! They were amazed it had so many.

We then worked in pairs to investigate smaller pumpkins by measuring their height with unifix cubes, counting the lines on the outside of the pumpkin and seeing if it would sink or float when placed in a bucket of water. They recorded all their findings on the pumpkin investigation sheets I found on Teachers Pay Teachers in this Pumpkin Unit from Nicole Ricca which is just full of fabulous FREE pumpkin printable goodies!. The students worked well together and they were so engaged in all of the activities. I set it up centers style and they rotated tables to complete each activity. It worked out great and this teacher didn't even have any spilt water at the end of it all - yay!

To finish off our week we had a pumpkin goods tasting. I brought in some pumpkin pie, pumpkin bread, pumpkin cupcakes and we made pumpkin dip together in class. As the students sampled each pumpkin good they filled out their recording sheet with a happy face if they liked it or an unhappy face if they didn't like it. We completed our taste test by drawing a picture of their favorite pumpkin good and then sharing our favorites aloud to see which was the class favorite. It turned out to be the yummy pumpkin cupcakes.

It was a wonderful and memorable week filled with lots of hands-on pumpkin learning!

Bern