Pumpkins, pumpkins, and more pumpkins!

This week we have been working on our pumpkin unit. We completed our "Getting to know our pumpkin" handout a little bit at a time throughout the week while we have investigated our pumpkin. 

 Alright, alright I admit we did not count all of the seeds in the pumpkin. When my kiddos went to music, I stashed half of them away. Thank God because we ended up counting 450 that I did keep and that took what felt like forever!!

  

This is our beginning sound concentration game. I made the mistake of forgetting to tell my assistant to glue the letter cards onto a different color of construction paper than the picture cards until after they were laminated- oops! So then I put stickers on the back of the letter cards and told the students to pick one with a sticker on the back and one without. This worked out pretty well until they started memorizing which letters had which sticker on the back. It was pretty clever so I couldn't even be mad :)

This was them coloring the life cycle stages before gluing them onto the green yarn "vine". I totally forgot to take a picture of the adorable vines. I will have to take some tomorrow and make a post!!

And finally, we carved our pumpkin today!! After voting using our "ballot" from my unit, we tallied the results and figured out what our pumpkin would look like. Here he is!! Pretty plain, but considering I had to carve something quickly enough to keep the attention of a bunch of 5 year olds it worked out pretty well!!

Friday is tomorrow-- woohoo!!

Beginning of pumpkins and last week's shape monsters...

This week we began our pumpkin unit and boy oh boy am I excited!! We used our pumpkin "ballots" and voted this morning on how our pumpkin will be carved. It is looking like we will have triangle eyes, a triangle nose, and a semi circle mouth. The kiddos (and I) are super pumped about it.

Another thing that we create every year at this time is our pumpkin life cycle activity I found from A-Z Teacher Stuff. After reading several trade books on the life cycle of a pumpkin and discussing it, we use the handout below and color in the pictures. We cut out the pictures and then glue them closed onto green yarn to represent the vine of the pumpkin life cycle. Then we create our pumpkins. Today we started painting our pumpkins. 

 

We use non-waxy paper plates and paint them orange. Once the orange has dried, we cut a little hole at the top of one of them and then staple them together. After that, we paint black lines on our pumpkins but as you can see, we have not gotten that far yet!!

Another thing that I wanted to share with ya'll was one of our favorite Halloween activities that we did last year, our Spooky Shape Monsters. I apologize that I can not for the life of me remember which adorable blog I originally saw this on- so if you recognize it PLEASE let me know so I can give credit where credit is due!! I unfortunately did not come up with this super cute idea on my own. Anyway, these shape monsters are glyphs- as if we don't do enough of these in my class already anyway!

 

  

Another little tip that I am sure many of you all do already anyway is to either cut your die cuts out of scrapbook paper or to mount your die cuts onto scrapbook paper. This always adds a little extra touch that makes everything just a little bit cuter :)

 

Pumpkin Mini Unit- Giveaway for the first 3 to comment

Here is my pumpkin mini unit that features science, math, and literacy activities:

In this unit there are quantity discrimination games, beginning sounds games, ending sounds games, pumpkin measurement activities, graphs, a syllable counting game, science predictions and recording data of actual results and more! You can find it HERE at my TPT store.

And because I am just completely stumped about what to dress up as this year for our school's Halloween parade, the first three people to comment below with a suggestion of an appropriate teacher costume AND leave their e-mail will get this mini unit for free!

Have a spook-tacular night!