Pumpkin Fun!

Ok I am so excited about everything we did today I have to share it with you in detail! My little white board will not do today!
During circle time I introduced a special guest, our pumpkin.
We talked about the pumpkin and I asked the children to come up with ideas of things you could do with a pumpkin, some of their answers were:
- knock on it
- carve it
- make a silly face on it
- cut it
- punch it
- throw it up in the air and catch it
- sit on it
- roll it

Then we tried out some of these things, they used it as a chair, knocked on it, it was rolled around a whole lot, I let them hit it, and they all tried to pick it up. When they tried to pick it up they realized that the pumpkin was very heavy!
That is where our next activity came into play. I asked the children one at a time to each compare the weight of the pumpkin to the item. The results were that we found out that a pumpkin is heavier than the garbage can, a feather, a book, and a chair. The pumpkin was lighter than the daycare, the fish tank, Miss Tina, and a car.

The next activity was for the children to predict what they think the inside of the pumpkin looks like. They were super creative with their answers some of which were rocks, nothing, candy, chocolate bars, gooey orange stuff, and pumpkin guts.
When we opened the pumpkin the children were very interested to see what was inside. We pulled out all the seeds and talked about how they felt, how the pumpkin smelled and what it looked like. Once we cleaned out the pumpkin we got out paper and we drew pictures of what the inside of the pumpkin looked like. We had some great seeds and lots of gooey lines.

Once this was complete the children watched as I carved the pumpkin and we put it out in the cubby room for everyone to see.
The final part of the day was when we roasted the pumpkin seeds and the children got to taste them after we had snack. Some of the children did not want to even try the seeds, some did not like them, some liked them at first and then decided they did not like them and the rest LOVED them!
What a great "hands on learning" experience for all of us!
I look forward to many more fun days like today!