Pumpkin Fun

The past several weeks have been more than busy! Oh, who am I kidding?  Yes, it's been busy hectic with parent-teacher conferences and all, but as any teacher knows the feeling, there have been many nights of coming home from work, barely having enough energy to make dinner, and vegging on the couch (umm, can you say, World Series?? GO CUBBIES!!!)  I'm finally getting a chance to post about the pumpkin themed activities we did over a week ago.  Several years ago I came across the Pumpkin Unit from Mrs. Ricca's store on TpT.  I was able to incorporate some activities with my first graders and added some of my own.  Depending on the availability of parent volunteers I can have for that day, I can have the kiddos move around to different centers.  This year, we were only able to complete three, but had a nice mix of science, math, and reading.   One of my fabulous parent volunteers read a book about the life cycle of the pumpkin and then the groups completed the cut and sort activity.

On this particular day, the groups rotated around to: The Life Cycle of the Pumpkin, Pumpkin Math Facts, and Pumpkin Investigations.  The plastic pumpkin cups are from the Dollar Tree.  Two dice were added to each pumpkin.  The kiddos had to shake their pumpkin and roll out the dice.  Then, they had to add up two addends.  I created the corresponding sheet for them to use and write down the number sentence and sum.

I was going to wait and post this later, but didn't want to wait too long!  There's still time for those who want to use some of these activities on Monday!  We haven't finished the pumpkin investigations just yet!  On Monday, we will estimate How Many Seeds (click on the title to get the book) are in our pumpkin, put the seeds in groups of five or ten, and then count to see how many seeds were inside.  We predicted how many cubes tall the pumpkin was, counted how many lines were around the pumpkin, described if the pumpkin was small, medium, or large.  Lastly, the kiddos predicted whether the pumpkin would sink or float in a bucket of water. 

I spent some time with the whole class and we used the different sized pumpkins to estimate how many cubes it would take to measure each pumpkin.  This was such a great pre-teaching activity for measurement.   In addition to counting our seeds, the kiddos will use the Halloween themed word cards to unscramble the sentences on Monday.

My firsties had so much fun working on all of these activities.  They stayed engaged and enjoyed tying together math, science, and literacy!  How much better could it get?!?!  I hope this post can give some primary teachers some last minute Halloween ideas for Monday! If you choose to do any of these activities, leave me a comment letting me know how they went!   Wishing you all a spookatuclar Halloween filled with many sweet treats!







Apples, Apples, Apples!

Hope everyone had a fun and relaxing weekend!  The weather this weekend made it hard to get anything done.  There were many clouds, rain, and that fall chill in the air!

This post is a fun one!  This past week, we spent a day working on some fun and engaging centers.  Our week started off by making our "apple people!"    We brainstormed a list of ways we like to eat apples: slice apples, carmel apples, applesauce, apple pie...you get the idea!  They filled in the sentence on how they like to eat apples and then glued the sentence in order on the apple.

The next day, the firsties had the chance to graph their favorite way to eat apples.  

Thanks to Fun in First, the firsties had so much fun sequencing the life cycle of the apple tree AND putting together the apple facts puzzles!  Time was a factor, so we weren't able to create the book from Fun in First or some of the other activities from the bundle.  Click here if you want to check out the apple centers from Fun in First

The last center we did was using adjectives to describe apples.  The adjectives went along with the five senses...let's say we had some "interesting" adjectives.  

Now, we are on to PUMPKINS!!!!