Pumpkin Time

 It’s Pumpkin Time! We started talking about pumpkins this week. I showed the kids a visual of how pumpkins grow. They start as seeds, flowers develop by spring, a green pumpkin grows by the summer, and by fall, a big orange pumpkin is ready to pick!

This concept continued to evolve out on the playground. A couple children noticed helicopter seeds and began to collect them. I explained that they were seeds from a maple tree, and just like a pumpkin seed, they will grow into tree one day. This idea was super exciting, so we hatched a plan to try to plant one and see if it will grow. Next week we will plant a maple seed and pumpkin seed in class.

This week we had a lot of sensory fun. Everyone got a chance to use markers to color pumpkins and wash them in soapy water. Bubbles never get old! The kids also took turns playing in our Halloween sensory mix of spiders, skeletons, confetti, and Jack-o’-lanterns. Sensory is all about exploration of materials, creative thinking, and letting kids learn through their senses. Each kid did something different with the Halloween mix or built off of what they saw their peers doing. They filled the little jack-o-lanterns with confetti, manipulated the skeletons, or put monster puppets on to scare the teachers into thinking they grew monsters on their fingers.

I have a few puzzle masters in my class, so I thought, why not put puzzles and sensory together? The kids had a lot of fun taking turns exploring a big bucket of rice and shifting through it to find pieces of alphabet to place back into the puzzle.

Our poems were 5 Little Pumpkin and Pumpkin Faces. We will be practicing and reading them in class for the next two weeks.  5 Little Pumpkins is great because it builds off of, and repeats, an earlier poem used in class; 5 Little Apples.  The poem teaches the children sequencing, counting, reading visual cues, and it's just plain fun, because the lights go out in the end!

Pumpkin Faces helps us discuss and identify facial expressions in a fun way.  We talked about what each pumpkin face might tell us about how that jack-o-lantern was feeling. We all practiced identifying and making the different facial expressions from the poem and then we read the poem together. I then passed out pumpkins with facial expressions on them to each child, we talked about what facial expression each child had, and when we read the poem a second time, each child stood up when they heard their pumpkin emotion being read out loud.

We also got down and dirty with some pumpkin crafts this week. We used water and vinegar to ‘glue’ tissue paper onto a paper pumpkin. The next day we removed the paper to reveal a beautiful watercolor effect on the pumpkins underneath. The dye from the tissue paper “painted” the pumpkin. The kids also used craft sticks, paint, glue, and googly eyes to make our friend Spookley from our story The Legend of Spookley the Square Pumpkin. We also painted pumpkins using marbles and paint!

It looks like we will be getting a lot of rain next week. Please remember to provide sneakers to change, if your child wears rain boots to school in the morning. I look forward to continuing pumpkin fun next week and having your families visit our classroom for back to school night on Thursday.

Thanks,

Ms. Rappaport