Unexpected Pumpkin Exploration

One autumn morning a friend brought a pumpkin to school. "This is my pumpkin." We have been learning about autumn for a while and what else makes you think autumn like a round, orange pumpkin? The pumpkin was a great conversation piece in our class not to mention a wonderful sensory experience. Add a few good open ended questions and we found much more than just seeds inside of this pumpkin experience.

• So what do we know about pumpkins?

"Pumpkins are orange and round." "This pumpkin is heavy." "When I went to the ice cream store with my mommy I saw a pumpkin there." "I have a pumpkin at home, it's on the stairs." "I go to a pumpkin patch and I saw a LOT of pumpkins there. Pumpkins grow on the ground and they was dirty, we has to clean them." "I see a pumpkin and it was HUGE!" "I don't have a big pumpkin I have a little, tiny pumpkin." "This pumpkins is not huge."

• What do you think is inside of the pumpkin?
  

"Open it!" "I don't know." "My daddy, he open a pumpkin and I see there is SEEDS inside!" "Can we open this pumpkin ?" "Can I open it?" "No the pumpkin is too hard." "We need a knife."

• Do you think there are seeds inside of this pumpkin?
  

"YES!" "I want to see the seeds!" "We going to open the pumpkin!" "Be careful Morah." "The knife is sharp, you can get a boo boo." "I don't touch the knife, only Morah can touch the knife."

"What is it?" "Wow LOOK there's seeds!" "So many!" "What are we going to do now?" "Can I touch it?"

"Lets take it out!" "Can we do that?" "Yes?" "I want to do that." "There's more seeds!" "What's that?" "It's pumpkin?" "Orange, squishy pumpkin!?" Giggles, giggles, giggles....

"It's squishy." "It's wet." "It's yucky-squishy, I don't want to touch it." "I want to touch it." "It's squishy orange." "I like pumpkin." "Can I eat it?" "It's food?" "No, you have to cook it first, right Morah?"

"Is it empty?" "No there's some more." "I want to get it." "Can you help me?"

"Now it's empty." "We cleaned the seeds." "That was fun." "I want to do it again!" "Yeah, lets do that again!" :)

Toddlers in Autumn

Autumn is a time associated with wonderful things like back to school, festive holidays, harvest and changes in weather and natural landscape. Naturally, the themes and icons that we are learning about in this autumn unit include changes in nature, leaves, hibernation, animal migration and preparation.

So how can toddlers authentically learn about and experience autumn?

- With whole bodies, all senses, lots of fun exploration and a bit of imagination.

We began our autumn unit by first discussing what we know about the summer. The information and experience was fresh in children's minds and they all had lots to share. The discussion naturally lead to noticing that it's not as hot anymore and we are now wearing different clothes than we did in the summer. That is because it's not summer anymore it's autumn time now. So what is autumn? What does it look like? How can we tell it's autumn? How can we learn more about autumn? We love books and they're great for learning about new things so we read a book about autumn and learned that signs of autumn are all around. We then decided to take a look outside our window to see if we can notice any changes in nature.

Through the window things still looked pretty much the same as they did in the summer. We needed to take a closer look and investigate the outdoors hands on. Before going on our nature walk we remembered from the book and talked about where to look when looking for signs of autumn. We also brought explorer bags outside with us so we could bring some evidence back to class for further investigation.

We looked high.............

We looked low...............

And here is what we found......

"Wow, look at all the leaves on the ground." "I think I see a bug." "Hello bug, are you there?"

"Look Morah, I found a pine cone like in the book." "I'm going to bring it to class."

"Look up there, I see some red and orange leaves." "The other leaves are still green, they're not red or orange, they didn't change colors yet."

"I found some leaves on the grass, I'm going to put them in my bag so I can bring them to class."

Later in class we took a closer look at all the leafy treasures we found on our nature walk. We touched the, we smelled them, we shared what we know and learned about them and finally we concluded that signs of autumn are most certainly all around.

Here we are exploring what we found.

"I found this leaf on the ground, this leaf is red and yellow."

"I got a lot of leaves and sticks, this leaf is green."

"I found some rocks outside."

"I'm looking at this tiny leaf, it's green with a little bit of yellow."

"You want to see...... Look........."

"Leaves are messy but that's OK because we all work together to clean up."