Fall Part 2

We have had a great week and I am so excited to be back in the classroom full swing! I missed these kids so much while I was out of town last week. This week we have continued our exploration about fall and we decided that it was time to investigate our pumpkin!! We started by looking at books to research how they grow. Our favorite book was “From Seed to Pumpkin” by Wendy Pfeffer. It is a nonfiction book that goes into great detail about the lifecycle of a pumpkin. Many students discovered that pumpkins grow on vines instead of on trees like they first thought. Afterwards, we decided to dissect it! As any scientist would do, we made predictions on how many seeds we thought a pumpkin held. We got everything from one giant seed to infinity (literally!). After our predictions were made, we cut it open. I wish I had a video of their reactions! It was hilarious/amazing/highlight of my week! The "eeeewwww", "cool!", and squeals that we heard were so fun to witness. We passed the pumpkin around and let the kids dig right into it and pull the guts out. Some chose not to while others were going back multiple times. After playing in the gooey pumpkin we counted all of the pumpkin seeds! We found out that in our little tiny pumpkin there were 447 seeds! All of the students thought that was incredible and hypothesized about how many seeds would be in a HUGE pumpkin. Maybe y’all can try this at home and count all the seeds if you are going to bake with any pumpkins. It was such a fun experience!

As we dissected, we pulled some seeds out and set them aside to roast. We introduced everyone to our recipe that we found in our nonfiction book and talked about our ingredients and how we follow the directions to get the best results. We went into the kitchen to wash our seeds then we mixed them with some oil, sugar, and cinnamon. We let them roast in the oven for about 15 minutes at 350 degrees. We set a timer in the room for about 10 minutes so that we could go check on them to make sure they were okay and then set another timer for 5 minutes so we could go get them when they were ready! We discussed letting the seeds cool before putting them in our mouths so that we wouldn’t burn our mouths and so we could taste the seed better. After letting the seeds cool we all sat down and tried them together. It was an overwhelming vote of "delicious!". This will be the first of many cooking adventures we go on this year.

Another thing we did this week was a sink or float science experiment. We picked out several of our fall items we found in last week’s nature walk and tested their ability to sink or float. We took this opportunity to talk about being scientist. We discovered that we are scientists everyday even in the smallest ways! We discussed that scientists first need to ask questions about the world around them. Next, they make a guess as to what the answer to their question will be, their hypothesis. Finally, they conduct the experiment to find the results, or conclusions. After talking about the steps a scientist uses, we conducted our own experiment. Each child had a clipboard with a chart in hand. Before conducting the experiment we placed our guesses in the hypothesis column. We placed a picture of each object under either the sink or float column. After dropping each object in the water we compared them to our hypothesis column and then changed them accordingly. We were all surprised at many of these results! It was a great time of discussing what surprised us, what we noticed, and what we would like to ask more questions about.

Love, Ms. Michelle

What do you know about fall?

Taliah- leaves change red, yellow, orange, and brown

Mariano – leaves all fall

Max Taylor – wind blows the leaves and they fall

Sally – We see pinecones

Maxwell – Pumpkins grow

Sholomo – we eat pumpkin seeds

Harry – We wear jackets

Van – we go apple picking


Approaches to Learning:

• Demonstrate growing ability to predict possible outcomes based on prior experiences and knowledge.
• Demonstrate increasing ability to use prior knowledge to understand new experiences.
• Try to solve problems encountered in play.
• Demonstrate an increasing ability to organize actions and materials in the learning environment. 

Social & Emotional:

• Interact easily with familiar adults by engaging in conversations, responding to questions and following directions.
• Participate in group life of class.
• Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play.
• Demonstrate with adult guidance simple techniques to solve social problems.

Language & Literacy:

• Classify objects and information by observable attributes into predetermined categories.
• Ask "how" and "why" questions about things in books and their environment.
• Begin to use classroom resources such as books, charts, photographs, and graphs to gain information about topics of interest.
• Combine some letters with pretend writing.
• Progress in understanding how books are viewed.

Mathematics:

• Organize and represent data with real objects.
• Show awareness of growing patterns in their environment.
• Represent simple joining and separating situations through 4.
• Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.