We had a terrific time learning the letter Pp over the last two weeks. We started out exploring this letter on Pajama Day! On this day, we went on a hunt around our classroom for pumpkins that were hidden. After finding them all, Mrs. Niles made us put them in alphabetical order and numerical order (this activity is now put out as an extra literacy activity to work on when done with our literacy stations).
We got many pumpkin donations and were able to use them to practice different math skills each day, including sorting and looking at size and measuring the height and circumference of different pumpkins. Thank you to all families who donated to our pumpkin collection.
We spent many math sessions talking about measurement. First, we made predictions about how many links we thought could go around the center of one of our pumpkins (circumference). One day we did our biggest pumpkin and other days we did a medium size pumpkin and a small pumpkin. For this activity, each child made a chain of links the size they thought it was. Afterwards, everyone got to check to see if their link was "too long," "too short," or the "right size." We sorted our links into these three columns. Some guesses were close but as you can see from the picture below most children created chains that were too short or too long. We talked about which group had the most chains and which had the least.
Our largest pumpkin ended up measuring 27 links around the center.
For several days, we worked on measuring as a whole group during math time. At the end of the week, this activity became a math center activity and the children needed to practice measurement on their own. They needed to choose small and a bigger pumpkin to measure. They measured the circumference using links and the height of the pumpkin using cubes. They recorded their data in a special pumpkin book they were working on all week.
Another pumpkin activity we worked on last week was measuring how many pumpkins tall each child was. We labeled pumpkins from 1-15 and stuck them up on a door. Each child stood next to the pumpkins and another child would tell them how many pumpkins tall they were. Then they put a post-it with their name on it next to that number. Afterwards, we made a class graph representing this data and the children also recorded these numbers in their pumpkin books.
Learning about pumpkins was lots of fun!
