Pumpkin Fun!!

I like to do something with pumpkins every year around Halloween.  We always go to the pumpkin patch, so I make sure to get a pumpkin for myself to use in class.  We studied apples the week before, so we did a little comparison to start off the week.  They had a few more ideas, but we ran out of time.  The kiddos completed their own Venn Diagram after we did this one as a class.

Last year we did Pumpkin Math and More, where each student had their own little book to complete.  Since I have kids two years in a row I wanted to switch it up a little bit.  We explored our pumpkin together and made a chart to record the results.  Some of their predictions were way off.  We need to work on our estimation skills!

I live in an apartment in San Francisco, so carving a pumpkin isn't really my thing.  There is nowhere for me to display it, and it would just smell up the apartment if kept inside.  For this reason, I make use of the class pumpkin in a different way, baking it!  Each year I take my pumpkin home and bake it to make pumpkin puree.  I let my kiddos vote on what kind of pumpkin treat to make.  Believe it or not, they chose pumpkin pie!  I was amazed, considering pumpkin cupcakes, pumpkin cake, and pumpkin bread with chocolate chips were on the list!

Today we put the pumpkin to use and mixed up the pumpkin pie.

Unfortunately, with all the craziness of kids in costume on Halloween, we didn't get a chance to taste it yet!  I put it in the fridge for tasting on Monday.   The kids will have to wait!

They did get a chance to eat some pumpkin seeds though!  I let them pull the seeds out of the pumpkin during class.  We count them, and then I take them home to roast in the oven.  A lot of the kiddos had never had pumpkin seeds before, but they all liked them!  I am looking forward to seeing what they think about the homemade pumpkin pie.

Christopher Columbus discovered. . .

the Bahamas (according to my students).  I think I have some more work to do!

Since Columbus Day was on Monday, I thought I would teach my kiddos a little bit about the man behind the holiday.  Whenever they have the day off I feel obligated to explain the holiday that has created this joyous occasion.

It was difficult to find books on the topic, but I managed to find a couple.  

I read these and discussed them with the kiddos.  I also taught them a couple of songs to help them remember the information.  I can't take the credit for these.  I found them online at Teaching Kids 1st and just copied them on to chart paper.

I was also lucky enough to get some free Scholastic News in the mail, one of which happened to be about Christopher Columbus!  It even included a couple of worksheets to extend and assess learning.

I only gave this page to my first graders.  

This one was for all my K/1 kiddos.  They had trouble with #4.  We will have to talk more about that.

I found some great free worksheets on TeacherspayTeachers to incorporate math and phonics as well.  

We have been working on word problems, so this one was perfect!  Thank you to Growing Firsties.

 Thank you to Practice Makes Perfect for these two math pages.

I put these pages in centers.  The kinders did the color by letter and the firsties did the other pages. 

Thanks to iHeartLiteracy for this one!

Thanks to Creatively Crazy in First Grade.

This was great to help them build sentences, work on handwriting, and work on using capitals and punctuation.  Thanks to Christina Mauro.

The kiddos also got to do some writing.  They wrote about where they would like to explore.  I forgot to take pictures of their notebooks.  Some of them were pretty entertaining!  To give you an idea, here are a few of the places they wrote about:

• Fairyland
• a person's mouth
• under the sea
• Mexico
• a carnival

After a week's worth of learning about Columbus, they still get some of the information confused.  However, they have a basic understanding of who Columbus was and what he did.  In all fairness, they probably know just as much about him as some adults.  Now we are on to more important things like, pumpkins and Halloween!  They could rave about these topics all day long!