Pumped for Pumpkins!

Well, if the above is true, then it's definitely fall! I am a lover of all things pumpkin. Along with the lattes, I love me some pumpkin bread, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin scones, pumpkin bagels and cream cheese from Einstein's and most recently the freakin amazing pumpkin coffee and pumpkin chai tea latte mix from Trader Joe's. Strangely enough, I don't really dig pumpkin pie. Pie in generally doesn't really do it for me. 

Besides being about 1/2 of my daily diet lately, pumpkins have also been front and center in my classroom. I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but my class pumpkin was NOT among all the amazing pumpkin characters I shared with you in this post. I was super sick the week we were supposed to make them and have them out on display I just didn't have it in me to get my craft on. I almost let it go without making one, but the kids were not letting that happen. So, I finally busted out the supplies and let the kids have at it. It seriously only took about an hour and they did all the work themselves. Look at this awesomeness!

Can you guess the book? It was fun to see them group up and figure out how to get it done. We had a group making leaves, a group making the spider, there's actually a diary in there that's kind of hidden that has pages with journal entries written on them. One little cutie made the hat out of felt and I had a group of boys stuffing a pantyhose leg with cotton balls to make the worm's body. If you want to see kids laugh hysterically for no apparent reason, pull out a pair of pantyhose. That'll do it. Trust me.

Here are my proud little artists with their creation. Seriously, how lucky am I to get to spend all day with these little nuggets? I actually miss them over the weekend. This is a special year, I tell ya...

We've also been working on our Pumpkin Science Investigation unit. I've done these kinds of math and science experiments with a pumpkin for years, but I never really put it together in such a nice cohesive unit. The kids love the trifold brochure to keep track of their data. Amazing how something as simple as folding a paper makes an activity seem that much more special. I love it because what I used to have to make about 10 pages worth of copies for is now condensed into one back to front page!

Here there are reading the informational text cards and diagram poster to fill in the background information:

Thinking hard about their predictions:

 Finding and recording the actual data:

Tomorrow we'll wrap it up by cutting into our pumpkin and counting the seeds. I snagged enough latex gloves from the clinic for all the kids to cut down on the "ew" factor. Experience is an excellent teacher. I was thinking of taking the seeds home and roasting them for the kids, but someone actually brought me some homemade roasted seeds today - and they are HARD to eat! They don't crack open like a sunflower seed. It was a serious struggle to get the seed out of the shell. I actually googled it to see if maybe you were supposed to just eat the whole shell. I got mixed answers that helped not at all.
Any advice on that? As if I need another pumpkin snack...