From Seed to Pumpkin
Pumpkins can be baked in a pie, carved into jack-o’-lanterns, and roasted for a healthy snack. But how does a tiny seed turn into a big pumpkin? With clear text and detailed, colorful illustrations, this book explains what a pumpkin seed needs to help it grow! This book also includes delicious pumpkin recipes and easy experiments to do with pumpkin seeds.
How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin?
Here is an adorable picture book for curious kids, which explores skip counting and estimation in a fun pumpkin-themed classroom experiment. “How many seeds are in a pumpkin?” Mr. Tiffin asks his class as they gather around the big, medium, and small pumpkins on his desk. Robert, the biggest kid, guesses that the largest one has a million seeds; Elinor, sounding like she knows what she’s talking about, guesses the medium one has 500 seeds; and Anna, who likes even numbers better than odd ones, guesses that the little one has 22. Charlie, the smallest boy in the class, doesn’t have a guess. Counting pumpkin seeds is messy business, but once the slimy job is done, to everyone’s surprise, the smallest pumpkin has the most seeds! As Charlie happily exclaims, “Small things have a lot going on inside of them.” This book makes a wonderful read-aloud companion to any math or science curriculum, and it’s a fun way to reinforce counting skills at home.
Pumpkin Jack
This is the perfect book for teaching about the life cycle of a pumpkin.
When Tim carves his first pumpkin, he names it Jack. When it finally begins to decay, he puts it in the garden rather than in the trash bin. As the months go by, Jack grows moldy, sinks into the leaves, hides in the snow, and finally sprouts a new plant. By the next fall, there are plenty of pumpkins for Tim to share at school. He keeps just one for himself and when he finishes carving it, he says “Welcome back, Jack!”
I put this book in the Science center with our very own Pumpkin Jack. The kids record the changes they see taking place in their pumpkin science journal and also match what our Pumpkin Jack looks like to the illustrations in the book. You can see our pumpkin Jack experiment below.
Too Many Pumpkins
Rebecca Estelle, had to eat lots of different pumpkin dishes during her poor childhood, and now she hates them so much that when a pumpkin accidentally falls into her yard, she shovels dirt over it so she won’t have to see or think about it again. In spite of all her efforts to try and bury the pumpkin, she has a yard FULL of them in the fall. Instead of letting the pumpkins go to waste she makes all of the pumpkin dishes from her childhood and carves the jack o’lanterns and invites her neighbors over to share in the festivities. This is one of my favorite books!