While I'm not a Halloween fan (I know, I know, I hate fun), I am teacher which means I can feign excitement over just about anything. Our school keeps the actual Halloween celebrations minimal- a parade of costumes for K-1st grade and that's about it. We don't have "parties" but our grade teams can choose three days of the year to have curriculum based "celebrations", so we do Pumpkin Math on Halloween.
My students also had drama class in the morning, and she had them doing some super spooky acting, so I think they got a Halloween days worth of fun at school.
This took just a bit of prep, but mostly because I put together my Pumpkin Math booklets and chose to put them on orange cardstock and laminate them for reuse each year. I figured it would save paper and be more festive- not to mention the fact that it just wipes off when pumpkin guts get all over it! So I went ahead and put a little extra time into making those and binding them so that now I can just grab them each year. Our packet'o'fun was just a bunch of themed worksheets and activities for if/when they had downtime waiting for the rest of the class to gather their data.
Over my break (haha), I got the classroom all set up for our afternoon celebration. Butcher paper on each table so that pumpkin guts could be examined and clean up was super easy- I also taped the butcher paper down so that it didn't wiggle around while they worked.. Pumpkin Math orange packet instructions and dry erase markers, as well as a measuring tape, plus their individual Halloween packets for down time. I was ready to rock and roll.
Before we really dug in, I read the first part of How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin? because it's perfect for this activity! I stopped about halfway through because I didn't want to give away any clues. We will finish it on Monday along with the second half of this pumpkin project.
Our data collection focused on number of lines, weight before/after guts removal, weight of the guts, number of seeds, and the pumpkin circumference.
When all my students got back from recess, we got to work collecting our data...
After each group gathered their data (this took about an hour), we put it all together on this chart on the board:
They worked on their Halloween packet while they waited for the other groups to finish.
Whew! After an hour, we hadn't even touched the second half of this activity, which was looking at the data and each group graphing one of the topics to share with the class. We will get back to work on Monday!
I think I sent them all home ready to put on their costumes and gather loads of candy!
What were your Halloween classroom adventures??
Are you going to put pumpkin packet on Teachers Pay Teachers?
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