The Great Pumpkin Investigation

Wow...what a busy week we had!  I first want to start off by saying thank you to all  of my parents that made it to parent teacher conferences.  Thank you for being flexible with your schedules and coming in to discuss your child's progress this year.  I enjoyed meeting with you.  As always if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email or call me.  I also want to send out another big thank you to everyone that ordered from Scholastics again this month.  Your orders truly enable me to get lots of books that are free for our classroom.  Every month I use the bonus points earned to obtain new books that my students are interested in.

Thank you for your book orders.

This week was our annual Pumpkin Investigations!  I love this time of the year and all of the hands on learning the kids get to be involved in.  We teamed up with  pre-k to do our pumpkin investigations this year.  Our firsties partnered up with a prek student to help them go through our investigation stations.  This year the students investigated the pumpkins weight and height.  In addition, they completed a force and motion and sink or float experiment.  The students first made a prediction at each station and then they completed the task to confirm or reject their predictions.  They had so much fun and learned a lot!!

Next, we cut open our large pumpkin to investigate what the inside of a pumpkin looked like.  We also predicted how many seeds would be in the pumpkin and then counted the seeds inside the pumpkin to check our prediction.  We were surprise at how many seeds were in the pumpkin.  We counted 232.  First we grouped the pumpkin seeds by groups of 10 and then we counted the leftovers.  The kids were also surprised at how slimy the inside of a pumpkin can be!!

Once again...thank you to everyone who donated pumpkins for our investigations, volunteered to come to the party, brought in snack and drink items for the party, and planned the fall fun for our party.  The kids really enjoyed themselves.  I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and enjoy the spirited fun of Halloween!