In Kindergarten A we got a classroom pumpkin and spent several days diving into the life of a pumpkin. We learned that they come from seeds and grow vines. They can be white, orange and red in colour, some growing big and some staying very small. We also discovered that pumpkins FLOAT! After creating a hypothesis (something you guess or test) and defining sink and float, we all put our ideas about our pumpkins ability to sink to the bottom or stay on top of water, on paper.
We dropped our pumpkin into a tub of water and…
We couldn’t believe it! Most of us thought for sure it would sink because it was so heavy but we quickly discovered its ability to float, due to it having a hollow inside.
We also determined that our pumpkin was 12 blocks tall after putting our thinking caps on and estimating.
We then decided to get messy and cut into out pumpkin to take a look at what a hollow inside looks like.
We saw lots of seeds, strings and stinky orange goo. We decided to do some more math and estimate how many seeds our pumpkin had inside of him. We had a range of guesses from 10, 99, 200, 610 and 1 billion! We took all the seeds out, cooked them with yummy spices and then counted them up as a group, totalling a large amount of 535 seeds!
All that counting made us very hungry so we got to eat our seeds as a tasty treat. Some friends thought our seeds tasted like:
burnt popcorn, coffee, nuts, salty, cheesy, crunchy, yummy
After an interesting snack, our final step was to turn our pumpkin into a Jack-O-Lantern.
We put our heads together and came up with ideas for each part of our pumpkins face. We then voted as a group and came out with a very interesting looking pumpkin named Pumpernickle.
We all really enjoyed the science experiments and math we did when exploring pumpkins!
~ Miss. Kim