The Pumpkin Project

So my school is literally across the street from a pumpkin patch. We could walk there in 2 minutes. But, I don't take my students for one reason: money. I don't have enough money to take my entire class to get a pumpkin. So, instead we have pumpkin day! I had an amazing grandmother buy each child in my class a small pumpkin so that we could experiment with what a pumpkin was and what it can do. We called it The Pumpkin Project.Usually, when I do not have a generous grandmother I get one pumpkin per table and students investigate in small groups.

This is a picture of one of my students investigating her pumpkin.
1. Observe the pumpkin (we drew pictures).
2. Decide if the pumpkin is big, medium or small.
3. Count how many lines the pumpkin has (I drew a black line so students knew where to start and stop counting).
4. Put the pumpkin in water and see if it sinks or floats.
5. Measure the pumpkin with unifix cubes.
6. Draw what kind of face they wanted on their pumpkin.

I have another version of this where they cut the pumpkin open and count the seeds. That seemed like too much for my TKs.

This picture is of Version 2 of the Pumpkin Project. Version 1 has the seed counting option.

Grab Version 1 and Version 2. Enjoy!