Fun School Day

I love school days like these. They are the ones where we get all our main subjects done first then have time for FUN stuff.  Today,  we grabbed some of our library books on the Pilgrims and Colonial life to read that went along with our Thanksgiving theme for the week.  I picked up an extra book from the library shelf that was on display about pumpkins for Hannah and Caleb to read.  Little did I know that it would turn in to a school day project for us and we'd greatly enjoy it. We researched pumpkins online and even saw pictures of the last five years of world record holders.  This year's largest pumpkin weighed 1810.5 pounds when it was brought to the Stillwater Harvest Festival in Wisconsin.

This book was such a surprise to me. It must have been written by a teacher. It not only had good science info about pumpkins but math too. The book was called "How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin?" by Margaret McNamara.

Mr. Tiffin is the school teacher in the book and he's teaching his class about pumpkins. He got his class to guess how many seeds were in three pumpkins. He had a large, medium, and small one. Some guesses were crazy big like a million, then others were in the hundreds and even one down to fifteen. After topping the pumpkins, the class set out to empty the pumpkins of the pulp and seeds to count. But Mr. Tiffin made them wait until the following day after he dried the seeds. Their homework was to think about how to count them. The following day, some kids decided to count by twos, others thought of fives and the last group by tens. He even explained to the kids that darker colored orange pumpkins with more lines on the outsides were ones with more seeds because the pulp and seeds grew on the lines. That was new to me. Sad to say, that I didn't know that.

At the end of the book, there's a page with pumpkin facts and a note from Mr. Tiffin for the readers to learn even more. Just reading this book encouraged me to take one of my baby pumpkins from my front door and carve in to it to determine how many seeds were there.

We all took guesses. Andrew guessed 315, Ethan 110, and Hannah 48. Andrew was the closest with 314! I was shocked that he was so close, only one away. Who does that? He might have guessed the right amount too because I probably lost one down the sink. You know where I should be going right now with him?  Yea, that's right, to the gas station to buy a lottery ticket.  I should make him pick out the numbers for it too.