Room 9: Smashing Pumpkins

Thank you to families who donated pumpkins for us to explore and dig into! Students were very excited to carve into a pumpkin, look at the "guts" and practice some valuable skills in decision making, skip counting, estimating, sketching and writing, and a little weird science. 

We read: How many seeds in a pumpkin? and did our own experiment. 

All students were given the opportunity to reach into the mysterious core of the pumpkin and pull out as many seeds as their little hands can hold.  Students came to the general consensus that gutting a pumpkin was "disgusting and slimy". 

Many thought the smaller pumpkin, pumpkin A had the least amount of seeds because of its size and pumpkin B had the greater amount of seeds.

Once seeds were cleaned and dried, the class was slit into 2 groups: A and B group.  Together, they had to make a peaceful decision on the most effient way to count the seeds. Group A quickly came up with the idea to vote between grouping the seeds into 2s, 5s, or 10s.  Majority voted for 10s since there were so many seeds. Group B took a little longer to come up with a decision after some debate and reasoning; "Counting by 1s would take too long!" -grade 1 student. "The other group is already starting, let's choose 5s, 3s or 10s." -grade 2 student.  Once again, majority voted for groups of 10 and group B began grouping.

Surprise! Pumpkin A had the most seeds in the pumpkin! We learned that pumpkins with more lines on the outside meant there was a row of seeds on the inside and it was probably on the vine for a longer period.  We also learned that grouping an amount in a certain way helped us count and see groups much easier. 

Today, we discovered pumpkin A grew interesting "furry" and "spider-web" like things on the inside. It also looked like it was melting into the shelf it was sitting on.  Upon picking it up, it quickly fell apart and made quite the mess! 

Both grade 1s and 2s have seen this mysterious fuzzy covering before: on old spaghetti, an apple, a peach, and cheese.  A grade 2 student shared it might be mold, which meant it was no longer good to eat or touch! Sorry pumpkins, time to go into the compost!