Pumpkin Season!

Hello! I was trying to get this post done earlier to give you some pumpkin activities that we are doing in Room 5 but here it is:

We have color themes each week for the beginning of the year and this week was orange. It's also the perfect time to do some activities! Here is a great book that I found at the library that I suggest using with this theme:

So here is a pumpkin versus apple measurement activity: 

The students can measure themselves (saw this idea on Pinterest) and then they fill out a sheet I made on boardmaker..how many pumpkins tall am I? how many apples tall am I?

Then we talked about which one was bigger? A pumpkin or an apple? And use our alligator to show bigger and smaller, then see since apples are smaller how many apples can fit into a pumpkin?

I also made a sheet on boardmaker where they measure using yarn, around a pumpkin, apple and their head and then attach the string to the correct picture and color which one was the biggest around.

With measuring a pumpkin we were also newspaper reporters that were assigned to report on a pumpkin. I made a sheet for each problem and then we solved the problems and put together one large newspaper article to hang in the hallway about what we observed as reporters on the pumpkin. Here is the large newspaper I made: 

If you can't read it the prompts were: how many cubes is it tall? How many links around is it? Does it have a stem yes or no? Our pumpkin is ____ and _____. The outside feels like ____ the inside feels like _____, We think there are ____ seeds, we counted and there were ____ seeds. Identify: pumpkin, seeds and stem.

They had a lot of fun with this because we cut it open and put all the insides on a tray and let them feel it, some were scared to put their hands in. I took the seeds home and counted them and then baked them. They got to estimate (given 3 choices) they thought there were 100 seeds in there but actually more like 500. They got to taste the seeds. They actually liked them! 

We also did 5 Little Pumpkins. We read the book from Boardmakershare.com on the Smartboard and then we read this one that Mrs. Flowers colored. Then they got to color their own and I bound them (by making two holes, using a rubber band connected with a paperclip). We re-read the story and then on the felt board I made 5 pumpkins and the numbers 1-5 they got to identify that first means one, second means 2, etc. and re-tell the story that way. I also made 5 brown paper bags with the numbers 1-5 and have pumpkins from the dollar tree in a bag. I told the story and took out one pumpkin each time and then had them play a game where they got assigned a paper bag and had to put that many pumpkins in the bag. They liked throwing them inside the bag, but did count them out!

Here is another activity that I found on pinterest (sorry I don't actually "pin" them I just go to the website so I don't have it saved but maybe you can search for it). This is a cute 5 little ghosts story that I made into a felt board story of ghosts that their mom goes to the store and tells them not to eat anything until she gets back because ghosts can only eat vanilla ice cream but they don't listen and each one eats something and turns that color, so they hide around the house when mom gets home. This has food identification, color identification, sad/happy identification counting and also a healthy versus unhealthy snack component. Also, it's fun and you can measure comprehension by having them identify the characters, what happened first, second and last, etc.

I added velcro to attach the food they ate to their body, then when you flip them over they turn that color and they are sad faces.

I made the places they hid on library pocket cards and added felt to the back, that way I could just stick the ghosts inside the pockets to hide.

Now this activity isn't halloween themed, but it is something we are working on, counting by 10's. I made these out of toilet paper rolls and I closed the bottoms with paper and tape and rubber band, then gave them colors to put colored sticks in. To make them stay in the muffin tin and not flop over, I added a sticky magnetic dot to the bottom. Now they can count out 10 colored sticks, and stick them in the spot, then we can count by 10's to 50. It's a great visual.

Here on sentence strips I made the 10's in the color that corresponds so they can follow along and point to each one as they count.

Hope you enjoyed! If I take more pictures of the boardmaker sheets I made and the pumpkin felt board I will upload them next week!

Happy October, Happy Halloween :-)