//Curriculum Update: Week of October 29 //

Happy November! The week surrounding Halloween is always a favorite week of the year for us. Although we don’t officially discuss and celebrate the holiday in the classroom,  we do feed off the excitement of the children and bring in some fun books and activities that relate to the season and pumpkins as a way to keep the spirit abuzz (since it is pretty hard to ignore! 😉)

This week we read How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin? by Margaret McNamara and recreated the experiment done by the students in the story. We opened up our clean, large pumpkin — scooped out the pumpkin, separated out the seeds, washed them, dried them off, and put them inside a bag labeled “Big Pumpkin”. Ms. Kristi brought in some seeds from a smaller pumpkin she had at home and we sorted them out into rows of 10 to count them together easily during circle time. We all made our hypotheses as to which pumpkin would have the most seeds or how many seeds would be inside each of the pumpkins. We counted together and found out that our large pumpkin had 363 seeds and the small pumpkin had 493! We learned that pumpkins with more lines on the outside and pumpkins that are darker in color actually have more seeds as they have had more time to grow on the vine.You cannot tell directly from just its size! So interesting and the kids were truly amazed! We also carved a jack-o-lantern out of our large pumpkin and the children enjoyed watching it lit up in the classroom during work time.

This week we also sang 5 Little Pumpkins and read the Julia Donaldson classic, Room on a Broom. We hope everyone had a happy and safe Halloween with their friends and families!