Our Pumpkin Unit

We've been having a blast with our pumpkins that we bought for halloween.  Here is a glimpse of what we have been doing.

We got the free pumpkin lifecycle cards from here and have been working with those 3-part cards.

We also worked with this cute poem about pumpkins.  They offer a cute printable version of the poem and we just used that.

We also examined the pumpkin when we carved our jack-o-lantern.

Here are some of the crafts that we did with the pumpkin theme.  The first one is an easy one, I let D cut orange strips out of construction paper and tear it into bits.  Then she basically glued that onto a paper plate for the pumpkin body.  She drew and then cut out shapes for the facial features from black construction paper and stuck that on.  She then punched a hole and twisted a green pipe cleaner for the stem.  Easy, no mess project.

This is another one we did with a lot of help from me.  We basically stapled strips (cut by D) of orange construction paper onto a toilet paper tube to make this.  This was a cool center piece on our dining table for a week!

I did not get the parts of the pumpkin cards, since we already did something similar when we did our apple unit.  We did look and examine the insides of the pumpkin.  We also roasted the pumpkin seeds for a delicious snack!  We bought a mini pumpkin pie from our local store to enjoy for desert on one of the days!

This post is linked to Montessori Monday.

Some Halloween/Pom Pom Math

This week I left a bowl of orange and black colored pom-poms representing halloween on D's math shelf.  We used it in multiple ways and had fun while doing these Math activities.

We did some sequencing/patterning.  I created a pattern and D had to identify and continue it.  In the examples shown below the first one is an ABAB pattern and the second one is ABBABB.

We had an activity where D randomly picked a bunch of pom-poms from the bowl and tried to guess whether she had "odd" or "even" number of pom-poms.  Then we verified her guess by grouping the pom-poms in pairs and seeing if there was an odd one left.  This was so much fun and we also ended up counting by 2s to figure out the total pom-poms.

We are working on number facts up to 10 and one of the ways was to partition 10 pom-poms into 2 groups in as many ways as we can.  For example, 10 can be 9 and 1, 8 and 2, 7 and 3, etc.

As you can see in the pictures above, 10 is represented using two colors, 5 orange and 5 black.  This is a RightStart Math way, where numbers are identified using 5 + x.  In the second picture above, 10 is partitioned as 4 and 6.

We then turned this into a game, where I would make D close her eyes and I would take out a few pom-poms out of the 10 and hide those.  D had to tell the hidden number by looking at the number of pom-poms left.   She got this and mastered her 10's facts in no time.  In the example below, she had to guess that I hid two blacks by seeing 8 (5 oranges and 3 blacks) still being left.

We did these activities multiple times this week while having plenty of fun!

Halloween/Pumpkin activities on our shelves

Last week I had posted about the trays we added for M (18 mo old) in the school room.  D(4) had a lot of fun with M's trays! I made a few trays for D using the halloween and pumpkin themes.  Here are some pictures of what we have.

I added this pouring bugs(bugs from dollar tree) tray.  I found these cute small glass jugs at the dollar store too!

We did this skeleton puzzle last year too.  I added this to the shelf and D loved it and started working with right away.  Along with assembling the skeleton we also discussed the names of the bones.  This also tied in well with our Vertebrate work.

I made some black and orange play-doh made for some halloween fun!  Walmart had some halloween cookie cutters that I added to our ever growing collection of play-doh tools!

We are practicing counting by 5's.  We don't own bead chains, need to get those! We've worked on our hundred board, stamping using our dot marker.  I added this for additional practice.  I used a marker to write the numbers on the pumpkin picks and used a styrofoam block to stick it in.  I placed little dots to help her know where to insert the picks.

This next tray is NOT halloween themed, but I thought I would post about it anyway since it was on our shelves!  We are working on addition facts up to 10.  So I set some of our domino pieces (sum up to 10 only) and a bunch of part-whole circles.  D was free to use our Right Start Abacus if needed.  She started off using it, but eventually got the facts and never needed it.

We also made a lot of pumpkin/halloween crafts, but that is for another post!