Getting ready for Halloween? Do you have your pumpkins ready to be carved? WAIT! Don’t carve yet, until you think of how much you can do with the activity. You can continue with your festivities and teach math at the same time!
When deciding how to carve the face, let your child think about the shapes they want to use. Circles, triangles, crescents, rectangles, squares, ovals, well, you get the picture. Have your child draw the shapes on paper that they want to use. When getting ready to carve, talk about how many sides the shapes have. Straight lines or curvy lines? Which are the largest shapes you are using? The smallest?
After your pumpkin is carved, don’t forget about the seeds! Estimate about how many seeds your child thinks there are. Count a pile of the seeds. If you are going to cook them, talk about the temperature and time they have to cook for. Many times I take these things for granted, and just do them. When I stop and let my daughter help me, and explain to her what is going on, I can see the gears turning, and not much is better than to see her learn, and to be happy doing it!
Another activity with the seeds is a little more in depth, but can be a lot of fun!
1) Cut out pumpkins from construction paper
2) Have your child write numbers on each pumpkin
3) Put the amount of seeds that correlates with that number
**If your child is not ready to write numbers, you can write them and work on number recognition!
**If your child needs more of a challenge, use the pumpkins with addition sentences on them, and then find the sum with the pumpkin seed.
Great ideas! We’re going to be doing some things with pumpkins in my preschool classroom next week and I’ll have to remember some of these.