This week we cut up a couple of pie pumpkins in the sensory table. A few children were reluctant to touch the "yucky" stuff on the inside at first, but after they saw everyone else having a blast they jumped right in!
We discovered that the pumpkins each had 6 pockets of seeds.
The students were eager to dig all of the seeds out and collect them in bowls.
When the pumpkins were cleaned out, one student exclaimed, "Wow! That's so many seeds. That one hundred seeds!" So, of course I had to take advantage of that teachable moment. We surveyed the class to see how many seeds they estimated. Most kiddos thought that there were 100. A couple thought that there weren't that many. So, we decided to count them. I labeled 10 paper plates with the number 10. The students counted out 10 seeds on each plate.
We dumped the 10 plates of seeds into a bowl and I explained that we just counted 100 seeds.
Then, we compared our 100 seeds to the big bowl that we hadn't even touched yet. One of my shining stars commented, "One hundred isn't really a lot. I think we had one hundred TWELVE!"
Of course, then we rinsed the seeds and stirred them with some olive oil and salt. We baked them in the oven and had a special pumpkin seed treat with our snack.
What fun pumpkin activities are you doing with your children?
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