What’s our favourite Math activity in October… Pumpkin Math of course!

Mrs. B. brought in 6 pumpkins, one for each table, and we set to work measuring and weighing.  Naturally we had to measure and weigh OURSELVES too!  It turns out that we weigh more than pumpkins (of course!) but the circumference of our heads could almost match the circumference of a small pumpkin!  Did you know that pumpkins have RIBS too?

We read that the number of ribs will help tell which pumpkins have the most seeds.  Too bad we didn’t read that story BEFORE guessing which pumpkin had the most seeds!

Next came the REALLY GOOPY part of Pumpkin Math… in order to COUNT the pumpkin seeds you have to SCOOP OUT the pumpkins!  Eight marvelous moms volunteered with that big job.

It sure was handy to have some “Power of Ten” strategies to help us.  We used egg cartons cut down to “ten frame boxes”.  Some people put 1 seed in each cup (10 seeds), some people put 5 seeds in each cup (50 seeds) and some even put 10 seeds in each cup (100 seeds!) We put all our counts on the SmartBoard and tallied up the scores using “Tens strategies” again.  First you LOOK FOR tens (actually, we looked for 100’s), then you MAKE tens (100’s), and finally you add up all that’s left.  We counted 2193 pumpkin seeds !  Whew!

Finally, we practiced our best “cooperation skills” to create 6 amazing Jack O’Lanterns. (There might even be a little geometry and symmetry math in there too!)

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What a fun way to learn math!