Do you think our pumpkin was heavier or lighter than our students?

If you guessed….lighter, you are RIGHT!  Today the children did some estimating “guessing” about how much our pumpkin weighed. We had all sorts of guesses from 1-100 pounds…. I explained to the children that there is no “wrong” guess, just some are closer to the right answer than others. Well…our class pumpkin weighs…9 pounds! We had one student estimate that our pumpkin weighed 10 pounds, what a close estimate!!!!

We weighed it on my bathroom scale! After we did this we decided it would be fun to see if our pumpkin weighed more or less than our friends. After weighing some of our friends who weighed between 28 and 33 pounds…we decided that our class pumpkin was LIGHTER than us!  The children were really thinking about these math concepts: lighter, heavier, more and less. Super job!

Does a pumpkin float or sink?

If you said…it depends on how much water is in the water table…you are right! Using an inquiry base approach, we placed 2 pumpkins in our water table (our first day our water table was open) and asked the children to tell us what they found. Only having a small amount of water in the table, we discovered our pumpkins did infact sink. However, with many more buckets of water, we found that our pumpkins began to float.

Why???

Because…the pumpkin floats because its mass is less than the mass of water it displaces. This happens because the inside of the pumpkin is hollow. It is mostly air, which has a much lower mass than water.

 

 

Jack-o-lantern Planning with Mr. Kneebone

We also voted on how we wanted to carve our pumpkin….Mr. Kneebone cut out a variety of shapes of eyes, noses and mouths and as a group, we decided, using “majority rules”, what our class jack-o-lantern would look like. We will be doing this tomorrow once we measure the circumference or how wide our class pumpkin is. We will use pieces of yarn to do this! So much fun! We will also cut open our pumpkins at the Nature Table tomorrow and explore! Our children did not choose to go the Nature table today so we decided to wait to cut our pumpkins tomorrow!

Here are a few pictures from play time. The children are so happy and enjoying learning at our many of centres. It is wonderful to observe and hear the language that comes from play.

Thanks for reading!!!

Ms. Jo-Anne 🙂