Pumpkin Investigation

Well, only one more sleep until the big day.  Since we are so close to Halloween, we thought we would keep the pumpkin theme going.  We have a pretty large classroom pumpkin, so we decided to find out how much it weighs.  There is a special tool to measure how much something weighs.  It is called a scale.  We learned that there are many different kinds of scales.

   

First we each tried to lift the pumpkin.  Some of us thought this was easy and some of us thought it was hard.  Since we had to weigh the pumpkin and none of our classroom scales were big enough, Ms. Arboe asked the school nurse if we could borrow her scale.  It looks like the one at the doctor's office!

Next we decided to weigh some other objects and predict if they were lighter or heavier than our pumpkin.

   

Then it came time to weigh the pumpkin...it weighs 25 pounds!  Look at the chart that we recorded the information on.

   

Next we did a pumpkin investigation.  An investigation is when you find out information about something.  We used a different pumpkin for this activity.  We needed to describe the outside of the pumpkin, count the lines, describe the inside and count the seeds.

We used the chart paper to record all of our ideas.  Then came the fun part.  Mrs. Kurt carved the top of the pumpkin open and we had to clean it out.  Luckily, there were lots of volunteers to help with this because Mrs. Kurt doesn't like to touch the pumpkin guts!

   

 

We have learned lots about estimating this week.  After we estimated how many seeds were inside the pumpkin, we counted them.  We figured out there were 331 seeds inside one pumpkin.  Wow!

Wait until you see what we do with the pumpkin tomorrow!

It was a fun day!