How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin

Last week I used the book How Many Seeds In A Pumpkin by Margaret McNamara. It is a great seasonal book that incorporates math and counting/estimating skills. Since we hosted a school wide math night two weeks ago, this was the perfect tie in.

For our activity I first showed the students a video I put together, it included a clip about how a pumpkin grows that I downloaded from Discovery Education (this is a subscription site, but if you teach in the state of GA we do have access to it), a time lapse video from YouTube about growing a HUGE pumpkin and a cute music video from Brian Vogan, "That's How a Pumpkin Grows". Then we started counting pumpkin seeds - for my older students (2nd grade and up) I gave each table a big pile of seeds and they had to count the seeds by grouping them in groups of 2's, 5's or 10's. They had to write down how many groups they had and then write down how many seeds they had. For my younger students, I made index cards with either 2,5 or 10 written on it. They had to glue the number of seeds that it listed onto the card, then each table counted by the number on the card (so one table had cards with 5's on them and we counted by 5's etc..).

Here is a slide show on how the lesson went. This week I start one of my FAVORITE story times of all - Boo Bubbles - will post pictures soon!