Autumn brings all sorts of joy along with it!  

During this Fall season the children are enjoying learning all about pumpkins.  Where do they come from?  How do they grow? What is inside?  Let's investigate so we know! 
As you can see, the answers brought nothing but smiles! 

Early in the week the children were read to from the books Growing A Pumpkin Pie and The Pumpkin Book.  They saw a short film about how farmers grow pumpkins too. As part of an ongoing project they began building a bulletin board "pumpkin patch".  Using their knowledge from the books and skills taught to them by their teachers the children displayed the lifecycle of a pumpkin right in their classroom. Here is what they learned: First they till the soil, then they plant the seeds.  Add a little sunlight and water well please. Little green shoots poke up through the earth and yellow flowers signify  there will soon be a pumpkin birth.  Green vines grow round and round. The baby pumpkins scatter the ground. They are green at first and very small.  Soon they'll be orange and big, fat, small or tall. First, the children used brown paint and texture tools to paint "tilled soil" on paper.  They even added real soil to the mixture. Next, the children practiced proper scissor skills to cut on a line making a spiral from green paper.  Those were the vines that grow across the ground.  Chenile stems were twisted around carefully fan-folded yellow flowers (made of tissue paper) to create the pumpkin blossoms (Did you know that they are edible?).  A tray task where the children traced around a mini pumpkin stencil and then cut their work out, again helped hone fine motor skills with scissors and using a writing utensil purposefully.  The tiny pumpkin cut out was then carried over to a bin and placed inside where the child added yellow and green paint and slipped in a golf ball to "rock and roll" paint it the color of baby pumpkins on the vine.  Last, pumpkins were painted in all different shapes and sizes and added to complete the perfect pumpkin patch.  Come on in and see!

Digging in to pumpkins was the best part of this study, so far! Collecting seeds, predicting how many were inside, then counting them proved to be a wonderfully sticky math lesson.  The children will have a chance throughout the season of Fall to compare the seeds from pumpkins with other fruit and vegetable seeds.  We will use transparent containers to plant them and investigate their growth cycle.  As the roots go down and the sprouts go up....we'll be watching and drawing pictures of the stages as they grow. You can follow the fun in the Science Journals later this school year OR just keep your attention here for the play by play. 

Stay tuned!

Ii

Ii is for inch, and you could measure huge smiles as the children investigated ice and BEST OF ALL ice cream for a while.

Salt adheres a piece of yarn to ice

Painting with colored ice cubes on canvas

I scream, you scream.  We ALL scream for ICE CREAM!!!

Mix the ingredients, put them in a small can, surround the can with salt and ice in a larger can. Roll, roll, roll!  Roll some more!  Roll that ice cream around on the floor!  Then eat that yummy, cold sweet treat....so delicious they'll ask for more!

The children had so much fun mixing and rolling to make their sweet treat.  It was incredibly cool!

This week we will continue our Fall fun with pumpkins, an apple study, and focus on the letter Uu.

Have a wonderful week!