Pumpkin Patch!

The week before Halloween, my class (and all the K classes at my school) made the traditional fall trip to our local pumpkin patch. We are learning about how plants, seasons, the weather, etc. move in cycles so this was perfect. This farm does a great job of really teaching the kids how the pumpkins start as seeds, then grow and then the seeds inside grow more pumpkins. They even learned why bees are important! Such a great trip. Can't wait for next year.

Here we all are. It's impossible to get 17 kids looking in the same direction, but this is the best shot. Check out little miss poser on the right :)

In the corn maze. They had places to do crayon rubbings of animal prints to see which animal had "stolen the pie". We never did figure out who done it, but I was just glad nobody got lost!!

In the pumpkin field, picking out their pumpkins.

And back in the classroom. It's hard to tell, but I'm weighing our class pumpkin. We also measured it to see how tall it was (7 inches) and made a "can, have, are" chart about pumpkins (sorry, no pic of that. but it turned out cute!)

And finally, carving the pumpkin and scooping the guts out! We started counting the seeds, but I cut them off at 100. Great moment to introduce the concept "more than." Our pumpkin has MORE THAN 100 seeds! It most likely 300-400.

I took the seeds home, washed them off and roasted them in the oven. The next day we did a little taste test. We made a graph and and analyzed our data. Turns out 12 kids like pumpkin seeds, 4 do not (1 was absent that day).

All in all, a great trip/series of lessons. There are so many fun things to do with pumpkins. Can't wait until next year!!

p.s. since I was roasting the pumpkin seeds, I figured I'd roast the pumpkin as well. Smash in the food processor for a while = homemade pumpkin puree! yum