Welcome to Read.Explore.Learn.! This meme was designed to be a place for you to share the learning opportunities, crafts, field trips, and other activities you have done this week that tie-in to children’s books. I look forward to seeing ways you have learned with and explored books.
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My Book Tie-Ins of the Week:
How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin? by Margaret McNamara and G. Brian Karas is a wonderful book about counting pumpkins seeds. It turns out you don’t have be the biggest kids in the class to guess the right number of seeds.
Charlie is in the wonderful Mr. Tiffin’s class. Mr. Tiffin challenges his class to guess whether a small, medium, or large pumpkin will have the most seeds. He has the class brainstorm how many seeds are in each pumpkin. When it is Charlie’s turn, he thinks the best guesses are all taken.
The next day the class uses spoon, bowls, and bags they have brought in to scoop, hold, and later throw away the guts and seeds of the pumpkins. Before the students headed home, Mr. Tiffin asked them to think about how to count them.
The next day they decide to count the pumpkin seeds from the big pumpkin by twos. The seeds from the medium pumpkin will be counted by fives it is decided. Charlie thinks the small pumpkin’s seeds should be counted by tens.
After arranging the seeds into number groups, they were counted. The large pumpkin had 170 pairs or 340 seeds. The medium pumpkin has 63 groups or 315 seeds. Charlie had 35 groups or 350 seeds.
Charlie is thrilled to learn that size doesn’t matter in pumpkins. Mr. Tiffen says, “Small things can have a lot going on in them.”
Mr. Tiffin taught me that for each line outside a pumpkin there is a row of seeds inside. Pumpkins that grow longer get darker and gets more lines. Guess what? Charlie’s pumpkin was dark orange and had many more lines than the others.
What did we do?
Cleaning Out Pumpkin Seeds
We cleaned the seeds out of a pumpkin. JDaniel didn’t like the gooey parts.
Counting Seeds
I found a great placemat at Dollar Tree with a grid on it. We placed on seed in each square on the placemat and then counted them.
Cover the Spider Legs Game
We rolled the die to see how many seeds we got to put on each spider leg when it was our turn. It was fun to practice counting. At the end of each turn, we cleared the seeds on the spider.
Roasting Pumpkin Seeds
We tossed pumpkin seeds with olive oil, cinnamon, and sugar and then toasted them in the oven. They came out yummy. JDaniel loved them so much he asked that I take a picture of them.
This post is linked to Feed Me Books Friday, Link and Learn, We Play and It’s Playtime .
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I like the cover the spider legs game and the roasted pumpkin seeds sounds yummy too!
Great idea to count the seeds. I should do more math work with Pierce. Otherwise he might discover my deep dark secret that I really hate math 😉
What fun! I love all of the hands on activities with the seeds!
The pumpkin seeds in cinnamon and sugar sound so good!
I didn’t know that about the lines. Now I’ve learned something.
What a great way to make use of the seeds!
How fun! I always like to see what you come up with. I’m still debating on roasting pumpkin seeds this year. If we make them, the cinnamon and sugar sounds like a great addition. 🙂
I heard about this book, but we haven’t read it yet. Sounds like an absolutely perfect book for activities that went with it 🙂
Mine didn’t like the goopy part of the pumpkin, either. But my preschooler did like eating the seeds!
Love how you tied pumpkin seeds into so many different activities! Lovely post.
One of our favorite pumpkin books. We compared the number of seeds in a large and small pumpkin last year. The large one had 696 seeds!
What a fun blog you have! : )
These look like great ideas I really like them.
Thanks for stopping by my blog today! Your blog looks awesome! I bookmarked it.
Cinnamon and sugar on pumpkin seeds sound like a great recipe for me to try this year! Your son is learning so much from all of these activities.
Happy Halloween to you and yours!
What a great way to toast pumpkin seeds! I’ve never thought of using those ingredients, thanks for sharing!
Thanks for stopping by and inviting me over! This is such a great idea! We use every opportunity to practice counting. I love the grid mat!
Thank you for commenting on my blog! It sounds like you are a very thoughtful and creative mom and I look forward to looking around your blog. Have a great weekend! Tricia
What a great way to explore counting. The grid was also a great way to group seeds for counting.
What a great idea!
What a great place mat for counting! I need to be on the lookout for that. I just stumbled and pinned this post. Vicky from Mess For Less
What neat activities! Those pumpkin seeds sound very yummy!
Such great activities!! I love reading this post every week, it makes me so inspired!
I’m just gonna say…there are wayyyy too many inside a pumpkin…and they are slimy. Gag.
Okay, yeah. I’m a wuss for sure.