Hey all! So last week I did an entire thematic unit on pumpkins with my students. It was a blast! I am saving this unit and will definitely be doing it again every year. (You can find it through the link at the bottom of this post.) The kids learned a ton and had so much fun in the process. It makes a teacher’s heart happy when the kids are learning with big-toothed grins on their faces!
So I bought each kid a baking sized pumpkin and for math we measured using customary units everything from height, circumference, to weight. Then they took that data, organized it, and created various graphs.
For reading we read the book, The Perfect Pumpkin Pie, by Denys Cazet.
It’s a Halloween story about the ghost of an old man who keeps coming to a house looking for the perfect pumpkin pie. I shut off the lights and read it to them in my finest 3rd grade teacher read aloud voice, and they soaked it all up. I love this book because it uses some great similes and has fantastic verb usage. It also provides a great opportunity to talk about the fluency strategy of using appropriate expression, as well as the usage of quotation marks. The possibilities are endless. We focused mainly on using similes to enrich our writing, vocabulary (some great words in this book!), adjectives, and character traits.
I created a Companion Product for this book as well as an entire pumpkin unit to go along with the math and science skills! You can view them both over at my Teachers Pay Teachers store (link on the top menu bar)!
Leave A Reply