• • Link your activity below.

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.

• Link your activity below.

My Book Tie-Ins of the Week:

The book Moonlight the Halloween Cat by Cynthia Rylant follow a black cat on her evening walk. Along the way she sees all kinds of things that cause her to love Halloween.

Moonlight loves smiles on pumpkins, scarecrows straw laps, children in costumes, and big yellow moons. She loves watch owls and raccoons during there evening travels. She loves houses lit by pumpkin’s inner light when people have gone to bed. She loves the stars that shine and the candy dropped at the door of her house.

Cynthia Rylant’s words and Melissa Sweet’s pictures paint a wonderful picture of the joys of Halloween and none of its freights.

What did we do?

I Spy Through a Cat’s Eyes

I glued a cat’s head to a file folder and cut out its eyes. Then I placed a variety of pictures inside the folder. JDaniel had to guess what each picture was based on the glimpses of the picture he saw through the cat’s eyes.

• Link your activity below.

JDaniel will start preschool in a week and a half so, I decided to find some books on preschool. I am going to share one  them this week and two next week.

This week’s book is called Ready, Set, Preschool and is by Anna Jane Hays. The book reviews many of the concepts Jdaniel will be learning about in school and was a great way for him to see what school will be about. We went through the book a couple pages at a time and talked about everything on them.

What does the book cover?

Learning to write your name

Counting

What you will find in a preschool room

Rhyming

Colors

Getting Dressed

Shapes

Meeting new friends

Getting new shoes

Parts of the body

And so much more…

I felt comfortable going through the book with JDaniel on my own, but the book does contain tips on how to work on each page.

This is such a great learning tool. I really loved the illustrations and the clean lines of each page.

What did we do?

Letters in Your Name Cookies
One of the things I have been working on with JDaniel is knowing the letters of his name.

I decided we would practice the letters in cookies. I printed out JDaniel’s name and we looked for cookie cutters that matched the letters. We did the same thing with the boy next door’s name, because he was over for over at our house.

Then we made sugar cookies that spelled out our names. Nathan loved cutting out the cookies. JDaniel loved eating the mix.