Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Pumpkins

Somehow I've gotten horribly behind on blogging, so hopefully I will catch up over the next few days!

A couple of weeks ago we started a unit on pumpkins. I'm trying to set out the books and things we'll be using before I go to bed Sunday nights--some weeks I'm more successful than others.

One day we made some playdoh in fall colors. I experimented with putting some pumpkin pie spice in the orange and it didn't turn out smelling too gross.

We talked about how plants get water and food through tubes, so we did the celery and colored water demonstration. We could see the tubes pretty well and we left it in the water long enough that the leaves even started to get blue spots.

Checking out the insides of the pumpkin. Jack didn't care for the feel of the "pumpkin guts" on his hands, so he was done with this pretty quickly.

I found this pumpkin collage idea on Candace's blog. He glued seeds down with yarn to simulate all the gooey stringy stuff. He really enjoyed this.

His finished collage!

We read the book Pumpkin Circle and made a pumpkin circle of our own (this idea came from Mailbox Magazine). We also used the pumpkin life cycle cards from Montessori for Everyone with this book.

Jack completed a little pumpkin report (also from Mailbox).

He measured how tall his pumpkin was...

...and how big around...

...and we used our balance to compare the weight. Our pumpkin weighed the same as four soup cans.

We practiced sequencing with these cards, too. I can't find where I got them from, so if you know, please let me know!

We didn't put the things we did in a lapbook this time. I am thinking about using a big notebook for some of our units instead of lapbooking everything. We'll see how that goes. I am thinking it's okay to still be looking for what suits us best since we're just in preschool now! ; )

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am so impressed with all that you do on every unit! RWBGMA

Amber said...

We are studying pumpkins next week. I love what you and Jack do!!